Nana Appiah Mensah
A witness in the trial of Nana Appiah Mensah aka NAM1, Chief Executive Officer of Menzgold Ghana Limited, has told the court that he came to realise that the businessman and his companies were deceitful in their dealing with customers of the company.
Fred Odame Asiedu, a businessman who invested GH¢1.2 million in the defunct companies which he could not retrieve as result of Bank of Ghana shutting the companies down for operating without a licence, was the prosecution’s sixth witness.
NAM1 and two of his companies – Menzgold Ghana Limited and Brew Marketing Consult Ghana Limited are facing 39 counts of defrauding by false pretence, inducing members of the public to invest and money laundering.
The witness led in his evidence-in-chief by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Yvonne Atakora Obuobisa, had his witness statement adopted by the court and it detailed the various investment he made with the companies between March and July 2018, all totaling GH¢1.2 million.
While answering answers under cross-examination by Kwame Boafo Akuffo, counsel for NAM1 and his companies, the witness indicated that “I realised that there was deceit in the business I was transacting with A2 and A3 (Menzgold and Brew Consult) because they kept giving us different stories and it compounded the situation that is why I went to the police.
Mr. Asiedu had indicated in his witness statement that he decided to invest in Menzgold and Brew Consult due to the numerous media publications by the two companies and the direct representations they made led him to believe they were licenced to deal in gold trading and investment.
Asked by the defence lawyer why he waited till October 2023, five years after the collapse of the companies to make a complaint to the police, the witness said he had previously gone to the police to make a complaint but he did not write an official statement but was only given a paper to write the amount of money the companies owed him.
“The reason I waited for five years is that in 2019 he (NAM1) made us do “validation” where we presented our documents at the office. All this while, I thought the transaction between us was genuine. He later introduced a different thing known as ‘Payboy’ where he asked us to go to the office and make payment and our monies would be given to us,” the witness said.
Mr. Asiedu continued that, “later on he brought a different card asking us to buy it for validation. I even have a copy of this card. It was after I had bought this card that I had realised that I was being deceived. That is why from 2018 I did not make any complaint till 2023 because every year he introduced a new thing.”
Mr. Akuffo then asked the witness to go through the statement he gave to the police and point out where he indicated there was deceit in the business the companies were transacting.
“I did not write deceit but I made a complaint with the police, since then he was stopped from operating by the government. If the business he was running was not deceitful he would have paid us our money by now,” the witness responded.
BY Gibril Abdul Razak