Serious Fraud Office Boss "Fired"

BRIAN ANKU SAPATI will, this week, leave his Old Parliament House office to look for a new job as the government terminates his job as the acting Executive Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

In fact, as you read this story this morning, Mr. Anku Sapati would be holding his last general meeting with his head office staff.

Last Friday morning, our SFO source said, he had to sit in an emergency marathon meeting to discuss his handing over notes with his successor and a few other top notches of the office.

The man to succeed the diplomatic, discrete taxman- turned-investigator is the robust lawyer, Theophilus Ashraku-Cudjoe, 53, the current deputy Executive Director in charge of Investigations.

Insiders say Sapati's exit and especially, his replacement with Cudjoe, is being met with mixed feelings by the over 100 SFO staff in the capital and the regions.

Those who welcome the change relish in the fact that T. A. Cudjoe, being a lawyer, is more qualified to lead the fraud office than Sapati who mainly holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Sciences and worked earlier with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

But those who frown on his appointment refer to his rather poor human relations.

"He looks most qualified being so knowledgeable, no doubt, but he is likely to be such a bad manager.

He is very dutiful but lacks the necessary finese," a senior official at the office said.

While staff who welcome Cudjoe's appointment and those who detest it reserve their opinions, the NPP government has quite a different reason for calling him to take the executive director's chair.

T. A. Cudjoe is the man who started investigations into the infamous Quality Grain scandal; he is the man who is still prosecuting the case.

Though, like most of the SFO officials, Cudjoe was appointed by the NDC government, he soon asserted his independence, it was gathered.

Sources said not even the fact that he had partnered the NDC's Martin Amidu in the latter's law chambers at Tamale for years could break his resolve.

"Therefore, when then-President Rawlings attempted twice to bully Cudjoe out of investigating Quality Grain, he rebuffed them all," a source hinted.

Then Mr. Rawlings reportedly pressed for Cudjoe's dismissal but the SFO board headed by Justice Quashie Sam could not grant the baseless dismissal and so appeased the President by asking Cudjoe to proceed on leave.

For one and a half years, when he was in the United States, waiting to be called back, he launched a deeper investigation into Ms. Juliet Cotton's Quality Grain and built a bulging file on it.

"It was little wonder, therefore, that after the NDC was kicked out of government in December 2000, the NPP administration quickly re-instated him as the DED and he wasted no time at all in getting the docket in place to prosecute suspects in the scandal," the source concluded.

Chronicle can further say that the next move of the NPP government is going to be a re-constitution of the SFO board, which has for over a year remained dormant.

By law the five-member board should comprise a nominee of the President in the person of the Interior Minister or his deputy, the head of the Narcotic Board, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), the Executive Director of the Office and a Justice from the Superior Courts.