At the very moment financial regulators and their International Monetary Fund (IMF) partners have been congratulating themselves on the successful stabilisation of a banking sector ravaged by years of crisis, a court has ruled that one of the clean-up’s most contested casualties was wrongly destroyed.

This has reopened uncomfortable questions about whether the exercise that cost Ghanaian taxpayers billions of cedis was as legally sound as it was economically necessary.

The Court of Appeal on May 21, 2026, unanimously restored the operating licence of GN Savings and Loans Company Limited, overturning both a 2024 High Court ruling and the Bank of Ghana’s August 2019 decision to revoke the institution’s licence.

The three-member appellate panel held that the revocation was unfair and unreasonable, and ordered that the receiver appointed to manage the institution return possession, control and management of its assets and operations to its shareholders.

The ruling is the most significant legal blow yet to the regulatory narrative underpinning the 2017–2020 financial sector clean-up, and a personal vindication for Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom, who has spent nearly seven years arguing that his institution was pushed into insolvency by the state’s own failure to honour its financial obligations.

A bank built, and a bank buried

GN Bank, as the institution was widely known, was incorporated in May 1997 as First National Savings and Loans Company Limited, before receiving a universal banking licence in September 2014 and rebranding. At its peak, it operated one of Ghana’s largest branch networks, with more than 100 locations serving underserved and rural communities across the country.

Its unravelling began when the Bank of Ghana (BoG) raised the minimum capital requirement for universal banks from GH¢120 million to GH¢400 million, with a December 2018 deadline. GN Bank was unable to meet the new threshold. On 4 January 2019, the central bank reclassified it as a savings and loans company, renaming it GN Savings and Loans Company Limited and assigning a regulatory advisor.

Just seven months later, on 16 August 2019, the BoG revoked even that reclassified licence, citing a Capital Adequacy Ratio of negative 61 percent against a regulatory minimum of 13 percent, governance failures, high non-performing loans, and the undocumented transfer of over US$62 million in depositors’ funds to International Business Solutions, a related Groupe Nduom company in the United States.

The cocoa roads argument

Groupe Nduom has consistently counter argued that government agencies left the institution financially exposed by failing to repay debts owed for infrastructure projects that GN’s affiliates had pre-financed. Dr. Nduom has previously stated: “The head of COCOBOD is aware of what I am talking about because we pre-financed a lot of the cocoa roads, but the government didn’t pay us and instead ended up collapsing our bank.”

He has demanded a structured repayment plan on loans used to pre-finance government projects, arguing that it was the failure to recover those receivables, not mismanagement, that rendered GN illiquid.

Groupe Nduom has put the total debt owed by the government and its agencies at over GH¢7.1 billion, with Dr. Nduom noting that “a debt that used to be GH¢1.8 billion is now over GH¢7.1 billion and growing every day with interest.”

The Ministry of Finance has disputed those figures, with sources placing the validated amount owed under interim payment certificate arrangements at a fraction of that sum; a discrepancy that has never been publicly reconciled. The conglomerate’s subsidiary, Ghana Growth Fund Company Limited, filed suit in the High Court in July 2019, seeking recovery of unpaid interim payment certificates on road and GETFund contracts.

The legal road travelled

The High Court, presided over by Justice Gifty Agyei Addo, ruled in favour of the Bank of Ghana on 24 January 2024, finding that GN Savings and Loans had been unable to meet its debt obligations due to poor governance structures, and that claims of malice and unreasonableness were unfounded. Groupe Nduom appealed on 29 January 2024. On 10 February 2026, a Court of Appeal panel granted the BoG an extension of time to file written submissions, with both parties given seven days each for their responses. Today’s ruling follows the conclusion of that process.

Stability narrative under strain?

The ruling comes as recent IMF report found that most of the 13 banks that recorded capital deficits following the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP) had met or exceeded their recapitalisation targets by end-2024, with the majority on track to restore Capital Adequacy Ratios to the 13 percent regulatory minimum without reliefs by end-2025.

The recently concluded Extended Credit Facility of about US$3.2 billion has provided the macroeconomic anchor for that recovery, with the IMF mission noting that “the authorities have taken strong actions to support financial stability” including restructuring and reforming state-owned banks and implementing a multi-pronged strategy to address non-performing loans.