Huge money transfer by Lebanese timbermen

(The Evening News) -- Some non-Ghanaian businessmen, particularly, Lebanese sawmillers have been transferring large sums of foreign cash from their local accounts into their accounts outside the country.

As soon as revenue from the export of timber products are paid into their local accounts, these Lebanese businessmen present invoices to their bankers to direct them to transfer such monies into their foreign accounts.

Nana Kwaku Asubongteng, a Kumasi-based timber producer, disclosed this to newsmen in an interview at Bonsu-Nkwanta in the Western Region. A GNA news item quoted Nana Asubongteng as saying that the excuse often given by these Lebanese was that they were going to use the transferred monies to purchase spare parts and other items but they end up lodging the monies in their foreign accounts to the detriment of the country’s economy.

Nana Asubongteng therefore appealed to the Ministries of Finance and Trade to investigate the transfers and to initiate measures to check the mass transfer of monies by non-Ghanaian businessmen into foreign accounts.

“If stringent measures are not initiated to check the practice, many non-Ghanaian businessmen will take Ghanaians for granted and the economy would continue to suffer, while the golden age of business policy would be a hoax,” he stated.

He said the government’s “Golden Age of Business” policy should not be misconstrued to mean that businessmen can enrich themselves through “foul means” at the expense of the country’s economy. That policy, he said is to encourage and entice both local and foreign investors to invest in the country and to contribute to the growth of the nation’s economy.

Nana Asubongteng said such negative practices from these foreign businessmen in the timber industry has made most of our local sawmills insolvent and unable to pay promptly for logs supplied to them by producers.

In another development, some Ghanaian timber producers from the Ashanti and Western Regions have expressed concern about the way the Forestry Commission has been discriminating against Ghanaian timbermen in the allocation of quota for production of timber. The producers expressed the concern at a meeting at Bonsu Nkwanta in the Juabeso-Bia District of the Western Region.

They alleged that the Commission has this year allocated large quotas to the Lebanese sawmillers while Ghanaian timbermen have small quota. As a result, the producers claimed that the Lebanese sawmillers are able to produce more timber for export than their Ghanaian counterparts. They therefore appealed to the Commission to ensure that fair play prevails in the allocation of quota in the future.