PRESIDENT NANA Akufo-Addo has given assurance of his administration’s commitment to paying all validated claims of persons and institutions whose investments were locked up with institutions which went under receivership as a result of the just-ended financial sector clean-up exercise embarked upon by the Bank of Ghana.
Delivering a message yesterday in Parliament to mark the dissolution of the Seventh Parliament, he said “I expect the process to be completed soon after the courts grant the liquidation orders for the remaining failed fund management companies.”
“Probably, the most difficult problem the government met coming into office was the state of the banking and financial sector. Many of our banks were in distress and had been kept on unsustainable and artificial life support by the central bank.
“The supervisory agencies were, unfortunately, not performing their duties, and the governance and management structures of many the banks were clearly not adequate.
“If truth be told, many of the finance houses were running what can only be called glorified ponzi schemes, and had lured many depositors into these schemes. We were in a desperate situation and urgent and radical measures had to be taken to prevent the collapse of the entire financial and banking sector.
“The Bank of Ghana, under new leadership, intervened, and has restored sanity to the sector, and, in the process, we have saved the banks involved and 4.6 million depositors’ funds. The government has had to find some GH¢21 billion to fund the cleaning up exercise. This exercise has enabled a more robust financial and banking services sector to emerge, the better to finance the rapid development of our nation,” he noted.
The President continued that it was unfortunate that many people got attracted to the unsustainable high interest rates that some financial houses were offering.
“In all financial dealings, we have to accept what the experts tell us that whenever an offer sounds too good to be true, it invariably ends up being untrue and unsustainable. Government is committed to paying all validated claims…” he underlined.
BY Samuel Boadi