Abuga Pele
National Democratic Congress (NDC) former Member of Parliament for Chiana/Paga in the Upper East, Abuga Pele, who was sentenced to six-year imprisonment by an Accra High Court in 2018 for causing financial loss to the state, is thanking President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo for granting him pardon.
The former National Coordinator for National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) which was later named GYEEDA under President Atta Mills and now called National Youth Authority (NYA), addressing residents of his hometown for the first time after breathing air of freedom, stated that “Thank God for my release, I thank the president and I thank the people of Nakolo, I thank all those who were instrumental in getting me out of prison”.
He said the truth of the whole matter that led to his imprisonment will surely come out, insisting that he was innocent of the offence that led to his conviction.
He said “If I have not said anything concerning my incarceration or what led to it or what the outcome has been, it is because the truth as I have said often will surely come out one day”.
Prison Headmaster
He indicated that “Finally I want to add that I was not incarcerated, I was not put in prison, you are only put in prison if your mind accepts or allows it. I was taken there to learn. People in prisons are my younger brothers, my sisters, and my fathers, some of them needed help maybe God sent me there to help them. I became the headmaster of the school that produced graduates’’.
President Akufo-Addo granted him a presidential pardon after he was taken ill at the Nsawam Maximum Security Prison, from where he was transferred to the Greater Accra Regional Hospital and admitted to the High Dependency Unit (HDU) of the hospital.
Abuga Pele was sentenced to six-year imprisonment by an Accra High Court in 2018 after he was found guilty on two counts of abetment of fraud and five counts of willfully causing financial loss to the state while serving as National Coordinator of the defunct Ghana Youth Employment and Entrepreneurial Development Agency (GYEEDA).
He received six years for abetment of fraud and four years for willfully causing financial loss to the state, both to be served concurrently.
Final Verdict
After about four years of trial, Abuga Pele, and a private businessman, Philip Apkeena Asibit, were sentenced to a total of 18 years imprisonment in hard labour by an Accra High Court in February 2018 for defrauding by false pretenses and willfully causing financial loss to the state.
The two were found guilty of 19 counts, including six counts of defrauding by false pretenses, two counts of abetment of crime, five counts of dishonestly causing loss to public property and five counts of willfully causing financial loss to the state by the court presided over by Justice Afia Serwaa Asare Botwe.
Asibit on the other hand was given a 12-year jail term for defrauding by false pretenses and three years for dishonestly causing loss to public property, both to run concurrently.
The court had also ordered the state to recover any assets of Asibit equivalent to the sum of $1,948,626.65 which he fraudulently received from the state.
Case Profile
The Attorney General’s Department was able to prove that Asibit did not undertake any consultancy work for GYEEDA or secure any World Bank funding to warrant the equivalent of $1,948,626.65 that he was paid on the orders of Abuga Pele.
Abuga Pele on his part was found to have abetted Asibit in defrauding the state when he presented a memo that warranted the payment of the said amount as well as causing financial loss to the state as a public officer.
The prosecution had called seven witnesses while the convicts also called several defense witnesses after the court dismissed their respective submissions of no case applications.
Judgment Day
The court had pronounced that Asibit who was the CEO of Goodwill International Group (GIG), availed himself as a representative of then state-owned MDPI and went ahead to present letters using the letterhead of MDPI at the blind side of the Director-General of the company as well as some staff of the company, and when he was caught he claimed that his company and MDPI interchangeably used letterheads.
The court had said that although Asibit continuously insisted that the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) seized his documents that he could have used to defend himself, at no point during the trial did he make any application to the court to order the state to release the so-called documents and could as well not provide any reasonable explanations to the use of MDPI letterhead to demand payment of services he never rendered the state but took huge sums.
The court also held that Asibit claimed that he had offered consultancy services to the NYEP through workshops but could not provide any evidence to that effect, and also added that he made a false claim that he had secured $65 million World Bank’s funding for the NYEP and also recruited 250 youth for the facilitation of the NYEP programmes.
On Abuga Pele, the court held that the memo he, as GYEEDA boss, presented to the then Minister of Youth and Sports which warranted the payment of the huge sums to Asibit was full of inaccuracies meant to move the hand of the minister to grant the money to Asibit.
– BY Daniel Bampoe