A member of the committee that investigated the alleged financial malfeasance at the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) is disappointed at the inability of government to retrieve all monies unlawfully paid to some institutions and individuals under the Agency.
Edem Senanu remarked that this failure on the part of government is helping the indicted individuals and companies to rob citizens of millions of Ghana cedis.
“We are being robbed; we are seriously being robbed and I think that we need to be much more radical about this issue of corruption,” he fumed.
Mr. Senanu observed that if the quarterly timelines which were given to indicted persons to repay the monies were duly followed; the state would have retrieved more than Ghc14.5 million.
He said he is saddened by the fact that although the members of the committee brought all their expertise to bare and provided timelines for which the monies should be repaid to the state, government has been unable to enforce the recommendations given.
“We brought all our professional expertise to bare but it took forever to get people to say we are going to act and deal with the people and issues in the report.”
“We sat people down and made them recognize that they were paid for services they never did and that money should immediately come back to the state,” he said.
His reaction follows an announcement by the government on Monday that it had retrieved Ghc14.5 million out of the millions of Ghana cedis which were unlawfully paid to companies and individuals.
In 2013, President John Mahama instructed the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, together with the Finance Ministry, to retrieve monies unlawfully paid under GYEEDA.
The directive was given after it was revealed that the operations of the Agency was riddled with financial misappropriation and the awarding of dubious contracts.
But speaking to Citi News, Mr. Senanu, who is also an anti-corruption campaigner, said government must take immediate steps to retrieve all monies.
“I have heard that a fraction of that has been paid, meanwhile, the agreement was such that quarterly, they were supposed to be paying certain amounts and at the end of the whole year, we got just a fraction of what they were supposed to have paid back for work not done.”
According to him, the Mahama government has lost the greatest opportunity to implement the recommendations which were given in the committee’s report on GYEEDA.
He again added that the state has “lost a very great opportunity to cut away from the past where committee reports hadn’t provided anything worthwhile to very strenuously act on the recommendations made, bring people to book and break the chain, but because we didn’t take that opportunity, when we do reports, we don’t see any action.”
