(4 minutes read)
· Dr. Kwabena Duffour, former finance minister of Ghana was
charged with money laundering, which caused the closure of the Unibank
Ghana, which he himself had founded.
· The Unibank Ghana Ltd. which was declared insolvent in August
2018 after shareholders and related parties were given loans amounting
to US$ 977 million, without undertaking any due diligence of the
persons availing the loans
Dr. Kwabena Duffour, former finance minister of Ghana was charged
with money laundering, which caused the closure of the Unibank Ghana,
which he himself had founded. Unibank Ghana was one of Ghana’s
biggest local lenders. Main crime framed against him is that he
received US$122 million b through money laundering. The Unibank Ghana
Ltd. which was declared insolvent in August 2018 after shareholders
and related parties were given loans amounting to US$ 977 million,
without undertaking any due diligence of the persons availing the
loans. Dr. Kwabena Duffour was also a former Governor of the Bank of
Ghana from 1997 to 2001.
Dr. Kwabena Duffour, however, denied the charges and said that he did
not deviate from established norms while giving loans to people.
Another person accused in the case is Dr. Johnson Asiama, former
deputy governor of the Bank of Ghana until 2018. He was also
implicated for having granted loans without following due process. The
court said that misdeeds of the people who were at the helm of affairs
caused a loss of US$ 28 million to the bank, which eventually led to
its collapse.
Kwabena Duffuor was the finance chief of the Ubibank from 2009 to
2013. Seven other individuals were also named in the charge sheet of
the Accra High Court on charges that include theft and money
laundering.
The scam broke out when the central bank started an industry-wide
cleanup in August 2017 to remedy years of poor governance and weak
regulatory oversight. There were 4.6 million depositors and a large
number of workforces with the now defunct bank. While Dr. Duffour was
implicated with money laundering, Dr Asiama has been charged with
fraudulently causing financial loss to the state.
Dr Duffour’s son, Kwabena Duffour Jnr, and seven others, have also
been charged by the state for their roles leading to the collapse of
the bank in 2017. They include Honda Holdings Limited, Ekow Nyarko
Dadzie-Dennis, Elsie, Dansoa Kyereh, Jeffrey Amon, Benjamin Ofori and
Kwadwo Opoku Okoh.
Dr Kwabena Duffour, recently asked for an interlocutory injunction
from the court to prevent the Ghana Police Service from what he
described as “unlawful threats and harassment”, after he received a
summons from the Crime Investigation Department (CID) on the charge,
among other things, that he contributed to the collapse of UniBank.
