President Akufo-Addo
Qatar-headquartered international news network, Al Jazeera, has disclosed responding to President Akufo-Addo’s query regarding a damning allegation it televised recently.
Following an exposé, ‘Gold Mafia’, in which a businessman, Alistair Mathias claimed to have done gold business in Ghana and that President Akufo-Addo was his lawyer, a claim the Number One Gentleman denied.
In the correspondence to the network, the President Secretary, Nana Asante Bediatuo demanded an unqualified apology from the network for televising a spurious documentary about President Nana Akufo-Addo.
Hint about the network’s response to the President was gleaned from a May 3 correspondence from Al Jazeera to local television network, TV3.
“We have responded to the letter of the President to the Republic of Ghana, correcting some parts of its content and clarifying various points,” Al Jazeera stated.
The Nana Bediatuo-authored letter to Al Jazeera dated April 25 read, “I am instructed by the President of the Republic, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to demand formally that Al Jazeera Media Network (Al Jazeera) retract immediately and apologise for airing an inaccurate and unfair documentary that contained spurious and unsubstantiated allegations against the President and the Government of Ghana.”
Al Jazeera claimed that “prior to the publication of Gold Mafia, we wrote to the President outlining the claims made by Alistair Mathias. The President’s response appears near the end of the documentary.” Gold Mafia, which was televised last month, was a journey into the Zimbabwean gold smuggling underworld and the attendant money laundering.
In the documentary, the aspects which has Ghana on the spot and rejected by the President depicts journalists posing as Asian gangsters as they engage with Alistair Mathias about to launder their ill-gotten monies.
Mr. Alistair, the financial architect as he labels himself, claimed to have a track record of orchestrating criminal syndicates, and is also presented as a person who designs money laundering schemes for many corrupt politicians in Africa.
Ghana, he claims, is one place where he has executed some of this schemes.
His claim of being a friend of President Akufo-Addo has been fiercely denied in the reaction of the Number One Gentleman’s Scribe.
“Ghana’s President is a good friend of mine, in fact, he was my lawyer,” he told the undercover reporters.
Mr. Mathias added that he used to be the biggest smuggler in Ghana at one point, raking out about $40 million to $60 million worth of gold a month from the West African country.
His claim of being involved in contract executions in Ghana has triggered anxiety among many, his name not ringing a bell in any quarter.
The President’s denial has not helped the cause of Alistair Mathias even as opposition see the subject as a quarry for partisan manouvres.
“In Ghana I take tenders, road construction, procurement, supplying different things, oil, this that. There, all the politicians get taken care of, indirectly because it allows me to do all my other stuff freely,” he boasts.
His so-called Mathias Holdings from which he subcontracts projects to others in Ghana is hardly known by anybody.
With President Akufo-Addo claiming not to recollect acting as a lawyer for Alistair Mathias or his company, has further damaged the so-called financial architect’s project.
Mr. Mathias’ later denial ever being awarded any tender by the Ghanaian government or entering into any government contracts in any African country has kept people wondering what the purpose of the so-called exposé was for.