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Parliament’s Finance Committee Chairman Dr. Mark Assibey Yeboah says it will take more than a directive from President Akufo-Addo for Parliament to review the Agyapa royalty deal.
According to him, Parliament can only reconsider the agreement if the president “intends to resubmit some additional information” for review and does not base his instructions on the Corruption Risk Assessment prepared by Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu.
While reiterating an earlier stance after the release of Mr. Amidu’s report, Dr. Assibey Yeboah told JoyNews’s Evans Mensah that the work done by the Special Prosecutor is of poor quality and should be ignored.
According to him, after reading the report, it became clear that Mr. Martin Amidu was on a fishing expedition.
“I keep insisting that Martin Amidu should not be taken seriously because he has done a sloppy job.
“And for me, reading what he has published, I will not waste time with Martin Amidu and his epistles or whatever it is that he published,” he said on PM Express, Tuesday.
His comment follows President Akufo-Addo’s directives to Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta to return the Agyapa agreement to Parliament for further scrutiny after the Presidency received a copy of the Corruption Risk Assessment report.
In the report, the Special Prosecutor had argued that there was a reasonable suspicion of bid rigging activity and corruption, including the potential for illicit financial flows and money laundering in the process that led to the selection of the Transaction Advisor.
According to Mr. Amidu, this meant that the selection and appointment of advisers for the agreement did not meet the “fundamentals of probity, transparency and accountability”.
Once again, the Special Prosecutor affirmed that all the various officials who participated in the processes that led to the approval of the agreement by Parliament violated various laws with impunity.
Since then, all of these accusations have been denied by the Finance Minister, who insists that the mechanisms surrounding the agreement were transparent.
Meanwhile, the minority in parliament say they feel vindicated by the report and call for a complete withdrawal from the deal.
