Menzgold saga: “Criminal prosecutions have commenced” -Godfred Dame assures customers of justice
Customers of the now-defunct gold trading company, Menzgold Ghana Limited, have been assured of justice by Attorney General Godfred Yeboah Dame.
The CEO of Menzgold, Nana Appiah Mensah, has been charged with 39 counts of defrauding through false pretenses, engaging in gold trading without a license, and money laundering in a new charge sheet that was filed at the High Court.
Mr. Dame called the long-gone dealership company a Ponzi scheme that left many of its victims without homes, with shattered marriages, and even some dead.
The keynote speech he gave at the 40th International Symposium on International Crime made this clear.
“It called itself Menzbank and metamorphosed into a number of names before eventually taking up the name Menzgold. It dealt with the purchase of gold collectables from the public and issued contacts with guaranteed returns to the public without a license from the relevant authorities…I am happy to state that after painstaking investigations, criminal prosecutions have commenced into the perpetrators,” he stated.
The scandal involving Adjenim Boateng Adjei, the former head of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA), was also singled out by Godfred Yeboah Dame as the most shocking of all corruption scandals involving public officials and procurement-related issues.
“A detection of false or inconsistent claims by contractors is often hampered by the illicit protection extended by public procurement officers who have the mandate to detect and revise them. The most chilling and perhaps shocking case of such dealing was witnessed when the former head of the PPA was implicated in what was notoriously described as the contract for sale phenomenal. As the head of the PPA, he was alleged to have established a company in which he held majority shares and which also actively bid for government contracts and which was subsequently sold to other contractors at a higher price.”
“The regulation of this act promptly resulted in the termination of his employment by the president of the republic and the withdrawal of his membership by various professional institutions and his prosecution which is ongoing,” he stated.
