Three people, including an agric director, have been arrested in the Sunyani West District of the Bono Region for allegedly stealing 4,000 bags of fertilizer meant for the Planting for Food and Jobs (PFJ).
They are Gilbert Sonkpi, district agric director; Owusu Banahene, district desk officer for PFJ; and a storekeeper, Alberta Adzade.
The District Chief Executive (DCE) for the area, Martin Adjei, gave the order for their arrest on Thursday after an audit team from Accra from the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MoFA) implicated the three.
The DCE later confirmed the news to DAILY GUIDE saying the case was before the Sunyani Municipal Police.
He said the police were investigating the circumstances under which over 4000 bags of fertilizer for the PFJ went missing from a rented Ghana Cocoa Board warehouse at Asufufu, a suburb of Sunyani.
He said as part of the ongoing audit of the PFJ programme by a taskforce from MoFA, he was informed by the head of the team that 4098 bags of fertilizer were missing from the warehouse and the suspects had not been able to explain why the agro chemicals were nowhere to be found.
According to the DCE, the suspects misinformed the audit team that he (the DCE) had travelled when the team arrived in the district, adding “but knowing what to do, the team went ahead and did their work as scheduled.”
He said “the leader of the team later found my number and called me deep in the night and informed me about it. The next day, I held a meeting with some officials of the assembly including the district coordinating director, Philip Baaza, the district finance officer, among other senior members, and we decided to hand them over to police before the team even finished its work.
He said “there will be no compromise and once it is proven that they are culpable we shall prosecute them.”
Regional police spokesman Chief Inspector Augustine Kinsley Oppong later confirmed that the police were investigating the matter.
danielyaodayee@hahoo.com
FROM Daniel Y Dayee, Sunyani