"Grab and chop" at Ghana Water company

Captain Victor Ansah (rtd), the Deputy Public Relations Manager formed a dubious consultancy, chaired a Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) tender board and awarded the printing of calendars to his consultancy-ignoring all rules pertaining to conflict of interests.

But if he intended to outdo his boss, he was mistaken: Charles Ansong Lawson, the P.R. Manager with equal obstinacy collected ?10.4 million ostensibly to facilitate the publication of the company?s advertisements but embezzled it. Victor Ansah and Ansong Lawson?s story is just one of the sequels to the wanton plunder perpetrated by officers of the water company, a figment of which the Chronicle had earlier published.

In fact captured in sections of the Adade Committee of Enquiry?s report are tricks and fraudulent ways the ex-soldier and Lawson employed to take their bite from the GWCL?s coffers. Joined in their raid was a private company called Ashtead Ghana Limited.

According to the report, Ansah registered a company with the name Vicom Ltd. as a consultancy into Public Relations and, for its directors, he chose himself and his two primary school children.

The ex-soldier?s next step was to start using one Akuffo Boateng as a front man to win contracts for his Vicom consultancy from GWCL, the very company he worked for full time. Ansah himself told the Justice Adade committee that this way they made huge profits, two thirds of which he always reserved to himself while back-passing the remaining to his front man.

A time came when Vicom grabbed a deal to print wall calendars for the water company, he maneuvered to chair the committee that evaluated the bids as his superior was outside the country. The choice of the company to print the calendars was a matter of course: Vicom won!

The observation of Justice Adade?s committee was this: ?Captain Ansah says that he did not inform the committee which evaluated the bid that his company was one of the bidders; neither did he, at a later stage, inform his senior, Anson Lawson, after he had returned from South Africa that his company had won the contract.?

It is clear that the water sector was a green pasture for Ansah?s Vicom Limited, for apart from the printing jobs, it did some other works for huge profits for the Community Water and Sanitation Department (CWSD) which, until December 1999 was part of the GWCL.

All the four jobs Vicom did for the GWSD were bankrolled by the generous Danish Agency (DANIDA). ?Here too, the perception necessarily, is that Captain Ansah used his position as Assistant Public Relations Officer (PRO) to get those jobs for his company,? was the comment of the report.

By the year 2000, Ansah had assumed a stature more of an industrialist than a PR man as he begun to produce sachet water, popularly called pure water, for sale. The company for that business he called Ofikesemunsu (Big Home Water) Enterprise.

Though he was using water served him at his East Legon private home at domestic rates for his commercial venture, Ansah never bothered to pay commercial rates. ?In his own admission,? recalls the committee ?he did not inform GWCL to change the user rate from domestic to commercial.?

If the ex-Captain is still hanging around the corridors of the water company pompously, Justice Adade?s committee recommends that he be dismissed and, as much as possible, the estimated amount of water he stole for sale and a penalty on it retrieved from him.

The scandal of Ansong Lawson begun on 10 March 2000 when he fired a letter to the Financial Accountant of GWCL, Samuel Aidoo, requesting him to arrange the release of ?10.4 million to facilitate a publication of advertisements in the daily newspapers. The subject matter for the adverts was a current metering programme and an impending disconnection exercise.

It turned out later the he did not pay the money but diverted it into his own pocket! In fact, though he was given two weeks to produce before the committee evidence of how the money was utilised, he failed to do so. Like a man grasping a razor blade for rescue, Ansong told the committee that he paid the money in cash to Kwasi Nyante, Managing Director of the company called Rochettes Limited.

Nyante denied receiving any such money from him right before the committee and in the presence of the gaping Ansong. Nyante explained that Ansong had never paid cash in any transaction between them and could not have done that this time alone.

For failing to prove that he used the money for the purpose for which he took it, Ansong pays the ?10.4 million with commercial interest, loses his job as the PRO and crushes out of GWCL. In the proceedings on the PR section, though it seemed initially that Charles Adjei, the Managing Director of the company had taken a break from the shady deals, it was not long before his name berthed and with a big bang!

He is said to have released $6,500 or ?52 million at the request of Ashtead Ghana Limited around June 1999. The ?Castle? had authorized Ashtead to collected the amount from GWCL and ?other participating organisations? towards the printing of a presidential diary for the year 2000.

The committee was convinced that the collection of money, even if there was any, was unlawful in that the water company could not show the committee any authorization from the Castle supporting the demand. ?Both Charles Adjei and Ansong Lawson confirmed that there was no such written authorisation from the Castle,? when the two were asked to produce written directive or authorization by any official of the Castle for the said collection by Ashtead. All what Adjei told the committee was that he telephoned the Castle and he was assured it was a ?genuine transaction.