Merchant/Fortiz saga: NPP, ex-Merchant board chair conspiracy exposed

The cat is finally out of the bag; the real intention of the bashers of Engineers and Planners (E&P) is out as The Al-Hajj has discovered a grand scheme by the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) and their backers, including the immediate past board chairperson of Merchant Bank, Mrs Marian Banor, to bring down President Mahama’s government.

Intelligence report available to this paper indicates that Mrs. Banor, Mr. Andrew Awuni of the so-called Centre for Freedom and Accuracy and the NPP, have collaboratively hatched a plan to, at all cost, incriminate President Mahama in the E&P indebtedness to Merchant Bank in order to call for his impeachment and eventual collapse of his government.

Mr. Awuni, a former presidential spokesperson of ex-President Kufuor who recently withdrew an earlier writ at the Fast Track High Court seeking an injunction on the sale of Merchant Bank to a wholly owned Ghanaian firm, Fortiz Equity Fund, has filed a fresh writ at the Commercial Division of the High Court roping in as many as 13 institutions and individuals including Mrs. Barnor, his co-conspirator.

The Al-Hajj has gathered that the intention of Mr Awuni and the former board chairperson of Merchant Bank in this new and bizarre enterprise of expanding the writ is to create a platform for Mrs Banor, who have had running battles with the CEO of E&P, who is as brother of the President, Mr. Ibrahim Mahama; and two other former board members to give incriminating testimony against President Mahama to create a condition for a call for his impeachment by NPP members in Parliament.

The Al-Hajj investigations revealed that Mrs Banor, who is also the Managing Consultant of MRB CONSULT, a private Legal and Management Consultancy firm in Accra, is peeved with President Mahama since when he was Vice President for no apparent reason, and has vowed to do everything under her power to bring down his government using the E&P and Merchant bank saga.

Her dalliance with both the NPP and Mr Awuni according to our sources is part of a wider agenda to achieve her desired dreams of bringing President Mahama’s rule to an end.

Apparently, Mrs Barnor, a former board secretary of SG-SSB is reported to have preferred South African firm, First Rand who also bided to buy Merchant Bank, but was turned down by SSNIT, to later accept the deal of Fortiz.

Mrs Banor’s interest in the whole deal according to a source at the troubled bank was to make sure her son, who is said to be advising First Rand on the acquisition of Merchant Bank, makes his all-time best money should the deal go through.

Having failed in that regard, Mrs Banor then found a more than willing ‘friend’ in Mr Andrew Awuni, whose interest ostensibly is to protect pension funds but in reality, has everything to further his party’s political journey, and who is being fed with the bank’s documents, which are leaked to an Accra based radio station to execute the diabolic agenda.

The Al-Hajj has gathered that the whole scheme is to at all cost implicate the President in the Merchant bank saga; and the only way that could be achieved is to create a platform for Mrs Banor and her cohorts under compelling circumstances to speak on the matter in court.

This is said to have informed Mr Awuni’s decision to withdraw his earlier writ and to file a new one after a series of meetings with Mrs. Banor, who per information available to us had agreed to be a co-defendant in the case together with two other past members of the board of directors to render an incriminating testimony against President Mahama when they are eventually subpoenaed by a court.

In August 2007, the Ghana Commercial Bank/Merchant granted a facility of USD37, 000, 000 to a company, E&P owned by Mr. Ibrahim Mahama, which had tenure of 60 months inclusive of a moratorium period of six months and a monthly repayment of principal plus interest of USD750, 000.

But for some mysterious reasons, which many have described as political, in October 2008, the Board of Merchant Bank took a unilateral decision without consulting the joint financing partner, Ghana Commercial Bank, to vary the terms of the facility from 60 months to 36 months.

This created serious cash flow burden for E&P, as nothing was left for the company after servicing the debt to support its operations and to pay salaries.

At the time the facility was granted E&P in 2007, it also appointed Merchant Bank to source a Mining Service Facility of USD60 million from an International Finance Institution which could have aided E&P to repay the loan on schedule despite the vary in the loan tenure, but the Board of Directors of Merchant Bank led by Mrs. Banor later declined the offer.

At this stage, E&P was near collapse as it could not buy even fuel for its machines to execute its projects until another international firm granted another facility which was repaid ahead of schedule.

It will be recalled that in her resignation letter addressed to the chairman of the board of trustees of the Merchant bank on September 18 this year, Mrs. Banor betrayed her anger and disappointment at the Fortiz takeover of Merchant bank when she stated “my resignation is prompted by recent events which in my view erode the confidence in the role and work of the Board of Directors”.

“On the grounds of principle, therefore, I consider that increasingly my role has become redundant and I do not want to compromise the firm principles of corporate and institutional governance which have guided my service to the country, the Bank and the Board as its Chair”. She added.