Adjenim Boateng Adjei
Former Chief Executive Officer of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA), Adjenim Boateng Adjei, has been hit by the Office of the Special Prosecutor with 17 charges for using public office for his personal gains.
Mr. Adjei has been charged with eight counts of use of public office for profit and another nine counts of directly and indirectly influencing procurement process to obtain an unfair advantage in the award of a procurement contract.
The Office has also charged the brother-in-law of the sacked PPA boss, Francis Kwaku Arhin, with one count of using public office for profit.
The Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyabeng, in a press release indicated that the two men will be put before an Accra High Court on May 25, 2022.
President Akufo-Addo, on October 30, 2020, sacked Mr. Adjei over allegations of conflict of interest in the ‘Contract for Sale’ scandal. He had been suspended the previous year following the release of the investigative piece.
The President after suspending him then reported the former PPA boss to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to investigate the conflict of interest allegation, and followed it up with a complaint to the Office of the Special Prosecutor to investigate the aspects of the scandal bordering on criminality.
In the ‘Contracts for Sale’ exposé, there were allegations among other things that Talent Discovery Limited (TDL), a company incorporated in June 2017 and having links with the PPA boss, won a number of government contracts through restrictive tendering, which were later sold to the highest bidder.
CHRAJ Action
CHRAJ, in February this year, banned Mr. Adjei from holding public office for the next ten years after it found that he had abused his office for his personal gains.
CHRAJ, in its report, ordered Mr. Adjei to refund GH¢5,611,530,000 he illegally acquired during his tenure as PPA boss.
The report followed new findings into alleged corruption and conflict of interest allegations made against Mr. Adjei by the Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII). The report indicates that as of August 28, 2019, a total amount of US $516,225 had been credited to Mr. Adjei’s dollar account, which he opened at Stanbic Bank right after his appointment in 2017.
The report also indicated that his euro account at the same bank also had €54,500.00 credited and €37,333 debited for the same period.
The CHRAJ report further revealed that Mr. Adjei’s cedi account at Stanbic Bank, opened on January 21, 2017, had a total of GH¢3.83 million credited to it and GH¢3.81 million debited to the account between the date of his appointment as CEO in 2017 and August 29, 2019.
CHRAJ said records obtained from the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) on the bank accounts of Mr. Adjei “further show that his UMB USD Account had seen cash flow of over US$110,000 between December 2018 and March 2019 alone, whilst total cash deposits into his cedi account at UMB alone between August 2017 and August 2019 amounted to GH¢5,697,530.00.”
It continued that, “In sum, between his two Ghana Cedi accounts at Stanbic and UMB, a total of over 9.5 million Ghana Cedis passed through Mr. Adjei’s hands for the two and half years he was in office, whilst a total of US$626,225 passed through his two USD accounts at Stanbic and UMB, and €54,500.00 passed through the Stanbic euro account.
The report indicated that although Mr. Adjei is a director of over 19 companies, he himself claims that he did not receive director’s fees from any of those companies except Beachfront Stevedoring Company Limited.
CHRAJ found that Mr. Adjei “enriched himself illegally and placed himself in contravention of Article 286 of the 1992 Constitution and his actions should be investigated, he should be sanctioned, and the illegal assets he acquired should be confiscated to the state.”
BY Gibril Abdul Razak