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General News of Thursday, 4 March 2004

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IFC Loan did not cause Financial Loss to state

Nana Akomea, Minister of Information told Journalists in Accra on Thursday that Government lost only time and travel allowanances and nothing else in it's pursuit of the IFC loan.

He was responding to a number of issues Professor John Evans Atta Mills, Presidential Candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) raised at a Public Forum organized by the main opposition party on Tuesday that the sitting government had not fulfilled the promises it made in 2000 to refurbish the building.

On the one billion IFC loan, which Prof Mills described as a scam, Nana Akomea said, " government did not advance any money or fees whatsoever to the IFC. There was no loss of money to the State, apart from negotiation time and travel."

He said the practice was normal in any negotiation as there had been many instances during the Prof Mills' Vice Presidency, which yielded nothing.

Nana Akomea noted that to try to impute or accuse government that it fell for a scam was, therefore, unfair and not objective criticism. He indicated that the Government had good intentions and sought a quantum of credit that would enable it to provide infrastructure more rapidly, through which the IFC group came up as being capable of providing that quantum of loan.