A former NDC Member of Parliament for Wenchi Johnson Asiedu Nketia says the New Patriotic Party should accept blame for allowing the arrested Nkoranza North MP to contest the parliamentary seat.

He says since party officials were suspicious of Eric Amoateng?s background it behooved on the NPP to have disqualified him in the first place.

Eric Amoateng and an accomplice Nii Okai Adjei have been arrested in New York for drug trafficking.

Mr. Nketia, who is also contesting the general secretary position of NDC, told Joy News, that the NPP should not shun the busted MP especially when the party has a record of covering up for their party faithful.

?From the history of the NPP, you would realize that they the tendency of covering up information that tends to criminalize their candidate for Parliamentary and ministerial appointments and so on.

For instance somebody like Grace Coleman, she has been convicted in the US and she has been in Ghana as a convict. Now the party maintained her as a deputy minister and on top of it at the end of the first term they actually sponsored her to contest the 2004 elections on their ticket.

Now when you come to the case of Osei Kufuor, former MP for Goaso, Asunafo South, he was known to have been sacked for stealing from his previous employment.

The NPP sponsored him on their ticket to go to Parliament. It didn?t end there; President Kufuor went ahead and nominated him for ministerial appointment.

I went through a hell of trouble to try to disqualify him on account of the sacking and I have even not been forgiven for doing so.

And when President Kufuor became aware of that fact, he never even made an attempt to withdraw his nomination. You take the case of the current MP for Tein who was DCE for Wenchi, he was found by a parliamentary committee on public accounts to have misconducted himself in awarding contract.

Parliament passed a resolution calling on government to punish him, he was never punished. There are countless examples. I am saying that the government has a machinery to crosscheck its operations wherever he was living outside the country, the type of work and for which he brought that plenty money.

If they want to run away from blame, then they stand as a very irresponsible party that will never do enough background checks on their prospective appointees,? he said.