Policy analyst and Vice President of IMANI Africa, Bright Simons, has pushed back sharply against assertions by Prof. Michael Kpessa-Whyte regarding the analysis of the latest State Ownership Report, insisting that critical accounting flaws exist in the document.

Speaking on JoyNews on Saturday September 5, 2026, following comments by Prof. Kpessa-Whyte, Simons rejected suggestions that independent researchers outsourced their analytical thinking to automated software, explaining that digital tools were used strictly to extract complex financial data.

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"We've been doing this work for almost 20 years before AI, GPT, Transformers, and the rest were invented... So, to suggest that we don't read the reports and we delegate our thinking to AI is actually offensive," Simons stated.

He clarified that software tools like Tabula and Excel Power Query were used solely to parse data from hundreds of pages of PDF documents for review.

"I was absolutely transparent... in explaining that we used Tabula to convert your PDFs, extract the numbers, put it in Excel, and apply Excel Power Query. If your people are not using those, that accounts for why you had mistakes, including value errors, in your seeing that you were repeating your reports," he noted.

He added, "Nobody has time to go and copy and paste every single number in a PDF into an Excel sheet. That's not even feasible, sensibly, in this kind of business.”

Simons highlighted specific technical areas where he claimed SIGA's calculations produced unreliable outcomes, pointing to repeated cost figures, treatment of foreign exchange gains, and inter-entity balances.

"When you put your situation where your costs, the cash number for 13 years, are repeated in aggregates, and it's simply a copy and paste from one year to the other, that number becomes unreliable because your cost recovery ratio that you've indicated is wrong," Simons pointed out.

He further argued that revaluation gains were improperly handled in the report's net profit evaluations and that internal arrears remained unaligned.

"We've shown you a breakdown of instances where, notwithstanding the fact that you had these revaluation gains going into net profit or shouldn't reliably be placed in net profit, you put them into net profit," he added.

"The way you've done your consolidation, the inter-arrears number between the entities within the portfolio that you've assembled, you've not reconciled them. And having done so, or failing to do so, means therefore that the consolidation you performed is not reliable,” he explained.

However he urged SIGA to address the technical critique directly, Simons called for mutual professional respect.

"These are very specific claims. You can simply say that you disagree with them and here's your alternative, or you don't think they're material. But to suggest that we've done nothing and we just simply relied on AI to say this, we don't think it's fair. I mean, respect us as professionals," Simons concluded.

ANAS/EB

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