How Buck Press Ltd Was Paid £2.4 Million Illegally

…by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Daily Post stuck out its neck last week when it reported that the contract awarded Buck Press Limited to produce biometric passport booklets for Ghana is tainted with corruption that stinks to the heavens.

Part of the proof of this fraudulent contract can be seen in the manner payment amounting to £4,020,916.80 was made to Buck Press Limited, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The entire contract sum according to documents sighted by the Daily Post is £7,499,000. On the 10th of May, 2007, when Nana Akuffo-Addo was Foreign Minister, an amount of £1,608,499.84 was paid to Buck Press Ltd by the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

After Akufo-Addo stepped down to contest for the flagbearership of the NPP, Hon. Kwasi Osei Adjei, who became the Foreign Affairs Minister, cancelled the contract to Buck Press Ltd.

On the 4th of December, 2008, he signed a new contract on BOT basis with a Malaysian company, IRIS Corporation Berhad to produce five million passport booklets at the cost of $79,900,000. This agreement replaced the contract signed in 2005 between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Buck Press Limited.

Yet, two days before this new agreement was signed, documents sighted by this paper indicated that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid another £1,298,210.83 to Buck Press Limited. Then on the last day of December, 2008, a further £1,114,206.13 was again paid to Buck Press Limited.

On the surface of this payments, the picture that is painted is that Hon. Akwasi Adjei paid Buck Press Ltd £1,298,210.83 on the 2nd of December, 2008, signed a new deal with the Malaysians on the 4th of December 2008 and then in spite of this new deal, went ahead to pay £1,114,206.13 again to Buck Press Ltd.

Daily Post's own intelligence sources within the Foreign Affairs Ministry say the payments to Buck Press Ltd on the 2nd and 31st December, 2008 were not made by Hon. Akwasi Adjei. It was rather made in 2009 by officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the NDC government in a deal involving NDC and NPP top guns, as well as Buck Press Ltd, short-changing the state by not less than £2, 412,41693.