Jacob Adongo Atule during the press conference
The Director of Gender and Disability at the Youth Employment Agency (YEA), Jacob Adongo Atule, has queried the judgement of an Accra High Court, which convicted and jailed Abuga Pele, Philip Akpeena Assibit.
According to him, the prosecution ignored vital information which could have vindicated the two.
He described the trial as “persecution and not prosecution.”
The two were found guilty of 19 counts, including defrauding by false pretenses and causing financial loss to the state.
Mr Pele has been sentenced to six years’ imprisonment in hard labour while Assibit was also handed a 12-year jail term in hard labour.
The court has also ordered the state to recover assets of Asibit, equivalent to the sum of $1,948,626.65, which he fraudulently received from the state.
But speaking at a press conference in Accra, Mr Adongo, who was a key defence witness in the trial, criticized the decision of the court, saying the trial judge “failed to evaluate the compelling evidence presented by the defence team before arriving at her conclusion and subsequent conviction of the two.
“The fact that the judge concluded that Goodwill International Group (GIG) did not produce any exit plan for NYEP cannot be the case per the evidence before her. Indeed, GIG developed an exit plan that was launched at Alisa Hotel and could not be refuted by the prosecution,” he indicated.
He therefore declared his “101 percent” support for the appeal of the case to set the two free.
Conviction
Abuga Pele, former National Coordinator of the Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA) – now Youth Employment Agency (YEA) – and a private businessman, Philip Akpeena Assibit, were last Friday sentenced to a total of 18 years’ imprisonment in hard labour by an Accra High Court.
The two men were convicted for defrauding by false pretenses and willfully causing financial loss to the state.
Abuga Pele, until the last parliament, was the longstanding Member of Parliament (MP) for the NDC in the Chiana Paga Constituency in the Upper East Region, while Assibit is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Goodwill International Ghana (GIG).
The court, in sentencing the two, took into consideration the “unrepentant attitude of the convicts throughout the trial and even on the final day when judgement was delivered.”
The court held that Asibit misrepresented himself when he claimed that he had offered consultancy services to the NYEP through workshops, but could not provide any evidence to that effect.
The court took into consideration the pleas of the defence lawyers that the two convicts were first time offenders but stated that they were not young offenders.
It indicated that the lessons that a young offender will learn is well known to the two convicts, hence have nothing new to learn.
The court added that Abuga Pele, who was a former MP, should have a lived a life worthy of emulation for the youth rather than engage in acts that result in financial loss to the state.
By Gibril Abdul Razak