Daily Graphic

The Graphic front page banner reads: "No outright sale of PBC, others - Moses Asaga declares. The accompanying story says a deputy Minister of Finance, Mr. Moses Asaga, has unfolded the strategy on the proposed divestiture of three state-owned enterprises and said they are never going to be sold outright. The three are the Ghana Oil Company (GOIL), Produce Buying Company (PBC) and Tema Oil Refinery (TOR). The Graphic says Mr. Asaga, in an interview, indicated that the government will hold shares in all the three companies after the sale, while workers of PBC and cocoa farmers will also have shares in the company. The paper says Mr Asaga conceded that the companies are of strategic importance to the economy and said "that is why in all, the supreme interest of the nation is being catered for". The Graphic says last Wednesday, MPs registered their strong reservations about the proposed sale of the three companies because of their strategic importance to the national economy.

In another front page story, the Graphic reports the Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BOG), Dr. Kwabena Duffuor as saying that the present stability of the cedi against major international currencies is the result of the general improvement in the economy and not through intervention by the bank. The paper quotes him as saying if intervention could stabilise the exchange then the economy would have seen a more stable currency in 1990, 1992 and 1996. The Graphic says Dr. Duffuor who was speaking at this year's annual dinner of the Chartered Institute of Bankers (Ghana) in Accra, state that the current stability partly reflects improvement in the economic fundamentals of the country. These include the declining trend in inflation, improvement in government finances, the slower monetary growth, and the relatively better return from holding a treasury bill rather than foreign currency.