The Woyome affair, a teaching moment 

E. Ablorh-Odjidja

February 15, 2012 

Faced with a massive fraud case such as this Woyome-gate, the demand arises for Ghana to come up with strategies to stop future fraud attempts of this kind.  No time for excuses must be allowed, starting with judgment on Woyome. 

If guilty, Alfred Agbesi Woyome must be brought to justice, not allowed to go scot-free.

But, already, one could sense a trend toward the scot-free in the various receptions and interpretations given so this case so far.

At least, there is an attempt to be serious, such as the report by the Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO).

Otherwise, you see the general drift to downplay the seriousness of this crime. And the basic question highlighting the seriousness of this matter has not been answered.

Did Woyome have or not have a signed contract with the state?

For an answer, the former NPP administration, under which the case rose, had said Woyome had no contract with the state.  And that, rather, the bid to build the stadia was by Waterville, a foreign company. 

The obvious assumption should be that if there were a signed contract, it ought to have been with Waterville, not Woyome.  Woyome was an agent for Waterville.  He could not have had a claim against the state.  His claim, if any, should have been with Waterville.

To Woyome’s credit, he had publicly not argued that he had a contract with the state, the EOCO report said.  

Yet, curiously, Woyome's lawsuit was for a personal default judgment against the state.  And the huge payment of GHC 51 million was made to him as ordered by the court on that basis.

"Woyome put in false claims by stating he was entitled to the amount because the government had abrogated a contract for the construction of stadia for CAN 2008 when in fact there was no such contract,” wrote The Graphic.

At this juncture, the 1992 constitution should have kicked in.  It required that a state-issued contract could only be approved and signed by Parliament.  To date, there has been no documentary evidence of a Waterville/Woyome contract approval by Parliament.

Yet Woyome’s claim was acknowledged as legal and processed as such, under the NDC administration, the same party of which the plaintiff Woyome was described as its financial supporter. 

The perplexing point is no official in the NDC government, before the payment of this default judgment, sensed a conflict of interest.  Rather, the claim was given speed and the payment was promptly made to Woyome.

This illegal maneuvering cannot be described as the work of some dunces. Woyome’s connection to the NDC ought to have raised suspicion.

The then-Attorney General, Mrs. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, an NDC member, “should have made sure that the suit in court was defended,” said the EOCO report. 

The AG did not.  She removed the brake that could have prevented the award.  She admitted to the court that the AG Department had no case and therefore did not have a defense!  Yet, the EOCO report had stated that “there were enough grounds to defend the action.”

This was the stance from the AG, even though her case files showed that Woyome, himself, could not defend the claim in an earlier presentation he had made to the AG department!

The EOCO report had more scathing indictments for Woyome.

It said, Woyome "put in a claim which by his own documentary submissions he was not entitled to. He manipulated documents and information and riding on the negligence (and/or complicity) of public officials, managed to receive money which he was not entitled to."

And that, "it has been detected from his bank statement that he made a payment of an amount of GHC 400,000.00 to Mrs. Gifty Nerquaye-Tetteh” (wife of Mr. Samuel Nerquaye Tetteh, the Chief State Prosecutor from the AG’s office) on June 16, 2011."

The entanglement of Woyome’s bank account and that of the Chief Prosecutor’s wife should have raised the red flag instead of a posture of no defense from state lawyers. 

Any serious-minded prosecutor would have found this entanglement legally unacceptable and would quickly have suspected that Woyome’s case was flawed.  

The link of GHC 400,000.00 to Mrs. Gifty Nerquaye-Tetteh,” the wife of the Chief State Prosecutor should have brought up suspicion: collusion with powerful officials of government to dupe the state.

And perhaps, more serious ramifications should have followed: That critical state institution; the AG Department, the Court, the Ministry of Finance, and the Bank of Ghana had been highjacked to make this huge fraud on the state happen.

The sum of the fraud alone is minimal.  But the size of the loss to the state is more complex than the total awarded to Woyome. 

It is buried in the wake of the crime; a potential, not apparent now, but huge enough to threaten the financial and general welfare of the entire nation for a long time to come.

Diminished trust in our institutions will follow as they transact with overseas partners because of the shadow the fraud will cast on the aforementioned establishments.

Knowing what we know now, how could these institutions have tolerated Woyome's claim to the point of even awarding such a huge check without due diligence?

How could the Finance Ministry, the Court, and the Central Bank overlook the fact that the said contract had not been approved by Parliament (but the EOCO, of course, knew)?

This omission alone is stark and dangerous.  One could see a template for future corruptions forming in the wing.  The seeming audacity of Woyome’s claim and the rapid escalation of the process that led to the "default judgment" and payment must put every citizen of this country on high alert.

From now on, beneficiaries of contractual bids to the state must be forced to accept by signature the disclaimer that they understood contracts to be legal only when approved and signed by Parliament. 

A political party connected to a scheme like Woyome-gate, through acts of its top officials, should also suffer a consequence - constitutional banishment from standing in contested public elections for ten years. 

This change must be constitutional and should affect all political parties, even when not in power.  And with balance, demand, and protection for the new administration to go over past contracts to determine if frauds like Woyome-gate had happened. 

Failure by the new administration to do so effectively should make the new government complicit in the crime and a target for the same constitutional punishment as the guilty one before it.

It is sad to observe all the acts in the past to arrest corruption in governance – coups, mass executions, elections – have only brought us to this Woyome-gate point. Now we have arrived at the conspiracy stage; a syndicated level of fraud that robs the state of its wealth.

The ease of the Woyome template should never be allowed in the future to corrupt the state.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, February 15, 2012

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