Yaw Buabeng Asamoah
The ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) has exposed the propaganda being mounted by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) in the raging Menzgold Ghana Limited scandal.
Leading the NPP charge against the NDC yesterday in a press conference was Yaw Buabeng Asamoah, the Communications Director of the party, who said the opposition party has a reckless and unproductive mindset whose earlier engagement with the media was used to heap political lies on the ruling party. He appeared to relish the Andrew Solomon bit when he asked that should former President John Mahama be described as a gay if he is spotted in bed with Andrew Solomon?
He said the NDC used their press conference for empty propaganda at a time when they should be commiserating with the victims of Menzgold.
The NPP, he indicated, is a party which believes in the rule of law and would do all it can in that direction, adding that the law enforcement agency would deal with the issue of Menzgold whose genesis can be traced to 2013.
“For the information of the NDC and its clueless leadership,” he said “they were in power at the time when NAM1 started the company. When the company changed its name and status to a bank, the NDC government should have been alerted to the fact that something was wrong. They did not do anything about the unfolding trouble because the party stood to benefit from it.”
Mr. Buabeng Asamoah described as a twisted logic the NDC accusation in relation to the Menzgold saga which accusation was presented by the opposition party’s Communications Director, Sammy Gymafi.
The NDC, he went on, did not know that it could act upon the Menzgold unfolding mess and watched on as it grew.
He derided the NDC’s suggestion on how to deal with Menzgold when during their tenure they did not do same.
In narrating what the NPP did when the danger posed by the illegalities of the Menzgold operations was discovered, Mr. Buabeng Asamoah recalled how in February 2017 under a serious government, as he put it, a meeting was held with the company after a previous one.
The state regulator, Bank of Ghana (BoG), he said issued a letter in July asking Menzgold to cease operations in the area of deposit-taking after they had switched to Menzgold from their earlier status.
The apex bank, he continued, did not rest on its oars in ensuring that the right things were done when it wrote a letter to the Minerals Commission in a correspondence dated 19th September 2017 asking it to take action against the illegality; that was the Menzgold operations.
The NPP government, he insisted, is a responsible one and only demanded of Menzgold to meet its regulatory requirements and did not shut it down as being peddled by the NDC.
“The NDC should be kind to the people who have been affected by the Menzgold issue by desisting from the litany of lies it is spewing.
“Liquidation in the manner the NDC communications chief put it does not imply that government should pay the investors of Menzgold.” The NDC, he repeated, “is only trying to politicize the situation out of nothing. It is so insensitive.”
The NPP is wondering why the NDC would drag the name of the President into the Menzgold saga and feed both Ghanaians and foreigners with lies.
Menzgold, he said, is one of the problems the NDC bequeathed the NPP to address alongside the banking crisis, road funds challenges and the crisis in the health sector which the government has sufficiently addressed.
In buttressing the NPP government’s belief in the rule of law, he said emphatically that “we will allow the law to work and in doing so nobody will be shielded”.
By MelvinTarlue