Today in 2013: MPs in massive 'chop-chop'

Exactly seven years ago, a report by Today Newspaper revealed that some Member of Parliaments in the then Mahama-led government adopted disingenuous means of siphoning more money from the national purse.

The report which generated lots of heated debates in the media stated that one of the devices they adopted was the sitting of the Parliamentary Select Committees with the Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) to discuss the latter’s (MDAs) budget allocations for the current fiscal year.

Although such meetings are supposed to be part of the core duties of the MPs, Today Newspaper established that Select Committee members demanded huge sitting allowances from the Ministries before they agree to meet them (the Ministries) on the budget estimates for the fiscal year.

Each member of the Select Committee demanded GH¢2,000 before agreeing to sit with a Ministry to discuss or deliberate their budget estimates. It was discovered that members of each Select Committee ranged from 20 to 25 members depending on the size of the Ministry whose affairs they dealt with in Parliament.

"By simple arithmetic therefore, for a 25-member Select Committee, a Ministry is expected to pay the members a whopping GH¢50,000.00 per sitting day. To make more money, Today learnt, some MPs deliberately delay their work so that they could sit for more days," the paper wrote.

Click here to read the full story reported by Today Newspaper in 2013

Fast forward to 2020, some Ghanaian politicians and civil servants have been named in a bribery scheme uncovered by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The plot involves a former banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc who is also Ghanaian.

Asante K. Berko, the Managing Director of Tema Oil Refinery, was named by the US SEC for using his influence as a vice president in the natural resource group of Goldman Sachs's investment banking division to push through a deal for the procurement of a power plant for Ghana.

Court documents revealed that Berko arranged the payments of bribes for members of the Ghanaian government and some legislators under the erstwhile John Dramani Mahama administration in 2015-16.

The payment was done on behalf of a Turkish Energy Company, described in the court documents as a client of the subsidiary.

The former banker allegedly pushed the money through an intermediary company in Ghana which then paid the monies to MPs to approve the deal, and also to engineers. Officials at the Energy Ministry were not left out as they also had their share of the bribe, the court papers alleged.