Opinion: Investigate the Forged Documents- By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Mr. Ashim Morton, President of MEF

At a sitting of the so-called Cash-for-Seat parliamentary hearings, Mr. Ashim Morton, the President of the Millennium Excellence Foundation (MEF), sponsors of the Ghana Expatriate Business Awards (GEBA), told the five-member committee investigating the alleged extortion of fundraiser monies from attendee resident foreign entrepreneurs that some of the documents presented to the investigators looked “disturbingly forged,” and obviously not produced by the organizers of the event (See “Cash-for-Seat Probe: Awards Organizers ‘Deeply Disturbed’ by Forged Document” MyJoyOnline.com 1/16/18).

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This seems to be strikingly in line with an established pattern in which a tactically alarmist parliamentary minority, led by Messrs. Mohammed Mubarak Muntaka, the NDC-MP for Kumasi-Asawase and Minority Chief Whip; Samuel Okudzeto-Ablakwa, the NDC-MP for Tongu-North; and Mahama Ayariga, the NDC-MP for Bawku-Central, has presented purported evidence of wrongdoing against operatives of the Akufo-Addo Administration that has been alleged to have been either forged or criminally concocted. We witnessed the same scenario vis-à-vis the parliamentary presentation of a budgetary statement by Mrs. Mavis Hawa Koomson, the Minister for Special Development Initiatives (SDI), which Mr. Osei Kyei Mensah-Bonsu, the Parliamentary Majority Leader and Minister for Parliamentary Affairs, insisted had not appeared in the original budgetary statement presented by the SDI Minister.

I urgently suggest that either the Chairman of the investigative committee or House Speaker Mike Oquaye launch a full-scale enquiry into the sources of such patent acts of criminality and forgery. Presently, not only has the President of the MEF vehemently denied that any company or corporate executive paid the outrageous sum of $100,000 to be seated close to the President of the Republic, the fact of the matter is that Nana Akufo-Addo had not even been officially billed on the program of the awards ceremony. Which simply means that the MEF organizers of the program of activities had absolutely no knowledge of whether, indeed, the President would be present at the GEBA event.

In sum, it would have been tantamount to a fraudulent act of gamble if any of the corporate executives who attended the ceremony had been induced to pay a set sum of hard currency to sit in close proximity of a man whose presence at the ceremony was unknown at the time that the invitations went out. On the strength or basis of the foregoing narrative alone, it makes perfectly logical sense for Mr. Morton, the MEF President, to insist that the reference to the title of “President” on GEBA’s program of activities categorically and unmistakably referred to himself as the event host, and not the President of the Republic of Ghana.

Mr. James Avedzi, the ranking minority member of the investigative committee, appears to be trying too hard to pull the proverbial rabbit out of a hat and could very well do quite a bit of credibility damage, if Mr. Morton does not keep a meticulous track of MEF’s financial records, vis-à-vis the GEBA ceremony. Mr. Morton was, of course, perfectly within his rights to have flatly refused to open the Foundation’s entire account for the scrutiny of the parliamentary investigative committee. For, the MEF is a privately operated non-profit entity and for that matter not subject to the sort of legislative scrutiny that may be demanded of a public taxpayer-funded organization or enterprise. But he equally has an obligation to have any expenditure figures he quotes before the committee gibe with the totality of the event’s budgetary figures.

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