6 GCB Board Members Pocket ?2bn For 4 Months Work

Six members of the Board of Directors of the struggling Ghana Commercial Bank (GCB) paid themselves a total of ?2,015,000,000 (about $230,000) for being judges and jury in an inquiry which took 130 days to conclude, even though a similar enquiry by the Bank of Ghana took only six weeks.

According to investigations undertaken by the Statesman newspaper, each of the five members of the sub-committee of the GCB Board received a sitting allowance ?2.5 million per diem while the Board Chairman took ?3 million daily, throughout the period.

Thus each member took home at least ?325 million while the Chairman went home with ?390 million at the end of the investigations. The ?2 billion does not include the usual perks of meals, drinks, transport and 15% withholding tax. The ‘enriched’ members of the Special Audits and Finance Committee were Board Chairman, Kwabena Gyima Osei Bonsu, Felix Ntrakwah, Franklin Kwabena Asamoah, Samuel Nii Noi Ashong, Peter Augustus Ocran and Joe Ofori.

However industry insiders are questioning the competence of the Board in allocating itself a forensic investigation, expected to be done by trained auditors instead.

In September 2002, it was uncovered that GCB overpaid the UK based Express Fund Money Transfer the cedi equivalent of ?1,251,035 from January to December 2001. The second case involved the alleged fraudulent withdrawal of about ?972 million using GCB’s internal software - The Fundsnet.

The Board therefore set up the Special Audit and Finance Committee to investigate the two cases.

Remarkably, while the Board’s inquiries were ongoing, the Bank of Ghana undertook its own investigations on a number of allegations involving the GCB, including the two issues, before the GCB Board. Bank of Ghana’s inquiry took about six weeks to complete and this had raised questions on the propriety of the GCB Board spending more than four months on the two cases.