Gisselle Yazji
Gisselle Yazji is in the news again, not in Ghana though, where she caused ripples on the political terrain with unsubstantiated allegations against then President JA Kufuor in the mid-2000s, but in the US where she is being probed for fraud.
Her name reportedly popped up on the fringes of the UN’s recent deliberations in New York, United States, following the Washington Post’s references to her Ghanaian escapade as narrated by her neighbour, Bob Underwood.
The woman of Middle Eastern descent, it would be recalled, claimed to have begotten a set of twins for former President Kufuor.
The then opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) capitalized on the claim with an ad hoc group christened, ‘Friends of Truth,’ formed to prosecute the political smear campaign led by notorious Alhaji Bature Iddrisu.
A rival group – ‘Enemies of Lies’ – also sprang up on the side of President Kufuor.
Matters came to a head when Giselle was said to be arriving at the Kotoka International Airport – an expectation given fillip by the then opposition NDC.
That was not to be when the country, having been put on tenterhooks on the day of arrival of the twins – had to stand down when there was neither Giselle arriving nor a set of twins, the matter dying almost immediately never to be resurrected.
Bob Underwood – her neighbour in Maryland, a 53-year-old man into international development through whose daughter she managed to get to him and strike an acquaintance – recalls how he stumbled across her escapades in Ghana in the 2000s when JA Kufuor was the president of the country.
He did this through the internet from which he found out more about the enigmatic woman who claimed also that the US Secret Service has access to her apartment, a claim which stunned Bob Underwood.
The Washington Post reports, ‘Underwood often has trouble getting to sleep, and on one of his restless nights, he stumbled across English-language articles published in African blogs in the mid-2000s about his neighbour serving as an adviser to the president of Ghana, John Kufuor. Kufuor’s Foundation did not respond to a request for comment according to the newspaper. (The Post recently showed a photo that accompanied one of the blog posts to Giselle’s neighbours in Maryland, all of whom confirmed that the woman pictured was the mystery woman in Apartment 713).’
She was lavish with stories about her success in Ghana which is rather put worryingly thus,
‘Giselle regaled Underwood with stories of her adventures in the free-for-all of Ghanaian politics, he says.’
She told Bob Underwood after doling $100 bill gifts in restaurants that she is on a monthly salary of $2.1 million.
She is the subject of investigations by both the Washington Post and the Montgomery County State Attorney after being reported of swindling two persons, the complainants being in her neighbourhood.
Until she came under the security radar and the subsequent ongoing two-pronged investigations, she had managed to put an impression of a wealthy woman with connections in the corridors of power across the world, claiming to be a secret wife of the Egyptian strongman, General Abdel Fatah al-Sissi and an intimate link to Hugos Chavez of Venezuela where she claimed that she was the wife of the Venezuelan late President Chavez.
She succeeded in conning her victims to believe that she had arranged a secret marriage with Egyptian strongman General El Sisi and she arranged the first telephone conversation between the General and President Donald Trump.
Many appeared to have fallen for her promises of making them rich overnight and that was where things began falling apart as this was the point where she went for the jugular.
The Washington Post has it that the very clever woman some call Madame Giselle has been accused by the two complainants of swindling them ‘in an elaborate scheme to sell T-shirts to the Venezuelan army’.
The case being referred to is the subject of a multi-dollar million scandal involving the Colombian military with Giselle Yajzi at the centre stage.
A certain chopper ride to Syria is an interesting spice in the Colombian ongoing investigation.
The high-profile US newspaper (Washington Post) is feeding on intercepted hundreds of text messages which are providing important clues to the maze of details.
Not even former President Obama was left out of her name-dropping manouvres, as she reportedly told Bob Underwood that she played a part in assisting the Obama administration in fashioning out a Pakistan Policy.
Although the Montgomery County State’s Office has declined commenting on the subject according to Washington Post, many persons have granted interviews to the investigating outfit in the past weeks, the Washington Post has reported.
Having been hardened by many cases of this nature over the past many years, the woman, when reached by the newspaper, said she planned returning to Maryland, Washington DC having earlier issued a series of denials of involvement in any act of criminality.
By A.R. Gomda