'Lord Commey's boys' sabotaging car retrievals

The National Operations Commander of the Vehicle Retrieval Task Force, Daasebre Kwabena Ahenkorah, has revealed that some officials who claimed to be working with the Director of Operations at the Presidency are sabotaging the team’s efforts to retrieve state cars allegedly stolen by individuals.

He told Kasapa FM Thursday 15 June in an interview that those officials claim they have done their own investigations and have concluded that the cars retrieved do not belong the state, hence should be returned to the individuals.

According to him, their action is defeating the work of the task force that has done painstaking work to identify state cars in the hands of individuals.

He said: “These officials who claim they are working with Lord Commey are preventing us from meeting him to tell him our findings. They keep attacking some of us because we are retrieving cars.

“Whenever we retrieve the cars, they would also come with a counter-claim that those cars do not belong to the state and so we should return to the owners. For this reason some of us have stopped retrieving state cars from people.”

Meanwhile, Mr Ahenkorah has revealed that an auto mechanic who was contracted by the Mahama administration to repair state-owned vehicles acquired 10 of such vehicles: four (4) Toyota Land Cruisers, four (4) brand new Pickups, one (1) Toyota SUV and a VW Passat, at abnormally low prices.

According to Mr Ahenkorah, two SUVs have been retrieved from the mechanic, Mr Asem Emmanuel, at Olebu-Ablekuma, a suburb of Accra. He said Mr Asem Emmanuel had diverted several state vehicles that were sent to him for repairs into his own garages.

He said the mechanic admitted to buying state vehicles at very low prices from elements of the previous administration.

Receipts covering the purchase of the said vehicles showed that the four brand new Double Cabin Pickups were bought at a total sum of GHS18,000 while each of the four Toyota Land Cruisers was bought at GHS2,000 totalling GHS8,000. Mr Ahenkorah said it is only the Toyota V8 that was sold to Mr Asem Emmanuel at GHS30,000.