Kufuor's Kuwait Oil Saga

Prominent World Leaders Approached To Intervene
Kuwait Oil To Exercise A Lien On Kufuor’s Properties

The Weekly Standard can today reveal that President Kufuor, over the last two years since his indebtedness to the Kuwait Oil Company became a major headache for him, made approaches to some prominent world leaders to intervene in what now threatens to become the worst disaster to befall a Ghanaian Head of State.

Kuwait Oil sources have indicated that there was an appeal put in on behalf of Mr. Kufuor by the head of one of the world’s leading monarchies.

According to our sources, Kuwait Oil’s decision to go for arbitration rather than a full-blown litigation in court was greatly influenced by what one of the sources term as “the Royal appeal”.

The “Royal Appeal” may have succeeded in getting Kuwait Oil not to institute a full-blown litigation in court, but it doe not seem to have stopped the company from pursuing a process to exercise lien on properties either belonging to Mr. Kufuor directly or in which Mr. Kufuor is believed to have interests.

According to our sources, some of these properties targeted by Kuwait Oil include a hotel property in London; a hotel property in La Cote d’Ivoire; a property in Burkina Faso, a hotel property; another hotel property in Spain; thirty-two fuel stations in Ghana; and African Regent Hotel, popularly known as Hotel de Waa Waa; Information available indicates that these properties were submitted by the legal team representing Mr. Kufuor’s at the arbitration “to show that he [Mr. Kufuor] has the means to make good his indebtedness”.

Since this matter broke, an otherwise loquacious Kufuor administration, noted for its penchant to rush to the media, when the facts are in their favour, to attempt to dispel the slightest hint or a suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of the President, has adopted the usual strategy of dealing with the matter with a very resounding silence in an apparent expectation that the matter would soon die down.
Over the last seven, getting on eight, years, President Kufuor has had many allegations of corruption, inappropriate financial dealings and assets acquisitions revealed about him, but on each occasion, with impunity and in total disregard for the very people who mandated him to be President in the first place, he has refused to be forthcoming with to tell the people of Ghana the truth.

The most notable of these is the case in which a man who was presented to the Ghanaian public as a “rich farmer” who, out of his generosity, dipped into his personal fortunes to refund state funds that were illegally used to renovate the President’s private residence, is now a house-help in the private residence of the President.

Since that charade was exposed, Mr. Kufuor and his handlers have maintained a stoic silence and have refused to tell the people of Ghana how come the supposedly wealthy farmer who could afford to pay for renovation work on the President’s private residence ended up becoming a house-help in the President’s private residence.

Indeed, Mr. Kufuor’s apparent disdain for the people of Ghana, which is reflected by his attitude to responding to cases of corrupt practices brought up against him and his Ministers, is wholly in tune with his infamous declaration that “corruption started from Adam”, and that whenever a case of corruption comes up he [Kufuor] would not do [or say] anything about it that would give his government a bad image.