Divestiture of GPC: Foreigner Poised to Seal US$1.2m Deal

INVESTIGATIONS conducted by CHRONICLE have revealed that the Ghana Publishing Corporation (GPC) which has been on the list of the Divestiture Implementation Committee (DIC) for the past four years is now ready to be sold to a foreign investor at the value of US$1.2 million (?9.8 billion) by the government.

Our research can further reveal that the DIC pegged the value of the corporation at US$ 5 million and the foreign investor being the highest bidder beat his Ghanaian counterpart, a private legal practitioner (name withheld) who offered ?10 million.

It was learnt that the foreign investor is going to produce fertiliser and cement and therefore will demolish part of the building to put up a factory for those two goods there.

Our inspection of the printing department suggested that some of the machines are serviceable or just need some repairs to put them back in functioning conditions.

The computers with colour printers, colour printing machines, one exercise books and envelopes line machine which our investigations revealed can be bought at about US$200,000 were found.

The building section will also need one folding machine, two sewing machines and one guillotine machine, estimated to cost about US$5 million.

Chronicle also inspected two hand composite machines, two litho machines, crab tree machine, two planeta machines and two web hunter machines which are in 50% working conditions.

The obsolete machines included one Reidleberger printing machine, one Roland two-colour printer, one Roland one-colour printer and one litho.

Chronicle learnt from a source that the whole rehabilitation of the corporation would cost about US$10 million.

According to the source before the divestiture, apart from private jobs, the corporation was handling about 60% of all government printing works.

Chronicle learnt that the 79 skeleton staff had not been paid their salaries for the past three weeks.