Bombshell At Stadium Disaster Probe

.....Documents On Plastic Seats Can't Be Traced

Documents covering the acquisition of the plastic seats fixed at the Accra and Kumasi Sports Stadiums, for which the nation forked out ?1,731,840,000 cannot be traced by the managers of the stadium property, the National Sports Council (NSC), several months after its purchase.

Similar documents on the acquisition of the electronic scoreboard, the floodlight, the public address system also bought in the region of several billions of cedis are also not in our possession, Mr. Daniel Otchere Nyanor, Estate Officer of the National Sports Council (NSC) has disclosed.

"There is also no record of these items in the asset register of the National Sports Council," he emphasised.

This bombshell was dropped by Nyanor, a former Land Economy student of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) at yesterday's sitting of the Presidential Commission investigating the May 9th Accra Sports Stadium disaster.

"I have don't have the documents on the plastic chairs that were bought for the 2000 African Cup of Nations tournament. By the nature of my work as Estate Officer of the National Sports Council (NSC) I must be able to know how many seats were bought, the number of seats supplied, the number of seats fixed and the number of seats not supplied," he underscored.

The seats were supplied by Compo Praha, a Czech based company through Mr. Joseph Kobina Ade Coker, a former Chairman of Accra Great Olympics and Vice-Chairman of the Ghana Football Association (GFA).

A white paper issued by the former National Democratic Congress (NDC) government virtually charged conflict of interest against him and recommended that he be censured by the Ministry of Youth and Sports, then headed by Hon. Enoch Teye Mensah.

Asked if he (Nyanor) had made any effort to locate the whereabouts of these document he said all efforts in this respect hit snafus. According to him his immediate boss, Mr. James Aggrey, had told him he had no knowledge.

Ditto his overall boss, Brigadier Brocke, Chief Executive of the National Sports Council. He said Brigadier Brocke later told him that he would contact the Ministry of Youth and Sports to find out if they had the documents but added that he had not told him anything yet.

The Commission on Monday ordered that samples of the plastic seats be sent to the laboratory to ascertain its durability as against the backdrop of the sheer ease at which the seats were bumped off and hurled onto the field. Other people who appeared before the commission yesterday were Dr. Marfo, Greater Regional Police Commander, Mr. Hama Hamid Issaka, Public Relations Officer (PRO) of the NSC, Mr. Kennedy Agyepong and Mr. George Amoako Management member of Kumasi Asante Kotoko and Director of Finance and Administration respectively