I have been reading now and again about the Ponzi-scheme-like activities of the Menzgold illegal gold-trading business that was asked to cease and desist by the executive operatives of Ghana’s Securities and Exchange Commission because, we are told, the operatives of Menzgold were not legally licensed to trade in gold and solicit promised high-yielding investment deposits from members of the Ghanaian public. Now, what overnight Good Samaritans like Mr. Cassiel Ato Forson, the former Mahama-appointed Deputy Finance Minister, are doing, literally caught with their pants down, hung and all, is to hypocritically pretend as if veritable scam-artists like the operatives of the Menzgold business enterprise simply mushroomed out of the blue, as it were, without any oversight complicity or responsibility from the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
Mr. Forson, who is also the NDC’s Member of Parliament for Ajumako-Enyan-Esiam Constituency, in the Central Region, wants the Akufo-Addo-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) to intervene in order to ensure that the globally known assets of the company, which has been effectively banned from illegally operating in the country by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), are sold to reimburse investors who may have lost their investments in the process or by this order. It is also rather fascinating to hear Dr. Mark Assibey-Yeboah, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Finance Committee, inform the general public about the fact that as early as February 2017, when the Akufo-Addo Administration was scarcely two months old, the Government and, by extension, Parliament, warned any citizens who had invested their gold and other capital resources with Menzgold to seriously consider withdrawing the same from this illegally established and/or unlicensed trading company which was faced with imminent collapse.
I am deeply inclined to believe that some prominent political scam-artists from the erstwhile Mahama regime of the National Democratic Congress may have heavily invested in the Menzgold firm, thus the vacuously desperate attempt by the former Deputy Finance Minister to pressure the Akufo-Addo Administration to intervene in a situation or process which, even as one astute Modernghana.com blogging commentator pointedly put it, could best be resolved by the courts. For me, personally, though, the kicking-and-screaming dervishes by the likes of Mr. Forson, ironically, exposes the unconscionable and hypocritical attitude and mentality of these self-serving politicians. Of course, I come to this conclusion squarely bearing in mind that Mr. Forson, even as one of two or three Deputy Finance Ministers, did not once raise his voice to speak on behalf of the even more legitimate need for the Ghanaian taxpayers, long taken to the cleaners by Mr. Alfred Agbesi Woyome, the NDC stalwart and leading financier, to be coercively prevailed upon by the key operatives of the Mahama government, including Mr. Forson himself, to have Mr. Woyome promptly return his GHȻ 51.2 Million loot to our national treasury, where his loot was brazenly stolen from with the very public and criminal complicity of then-President John Evans Atta-Mills, late, and one aptly supposes, the equally criminal complicity of then-Vice-President John Dramani Mahama.
I confidently make the foregoing supposition in the case of Mr. Mahama because in the leadup to the 2012 Presidential Election, the then-Interim President Mahama had opportunistically rode on the electioneering campaign crest of ensuring that Mr. Woyome would promptly return the people’s money to where he had stolen the same from, with interest, in absolutely no time at all. It is equally significant to note that as of this writing, the approximately GHȻ 5 Million that the globally infamous Mega-Thief has so far returned to our national treasury, has exclusively been through the instrumentality and diligent legal breastwork of Attorney-General Gloria Akuffo and her equally hardworking associates at the Ministry of Justice (and Fair-Play). Interestingly, it has been NDC stalwarts like Mr. Forson who have vigorously shielded Mr. Woyome from promptly and fully returning his loot by accompanying this pathologically thievish reprobate to the Arusha, Tanzania-based African Human Rights Court, in order to ensure that Mr. Woyome gets to keep his loot at all costs.
I am also quite certain that the criminal operatives of Menzgold will eventually be brought to book. But it will not be because of the morally grandstanding hypocritical call or agitation by pathological cynics and political scam-artists like Mr. Forson. Rather, the Menzgold operatives are far more likely to be brought to book primarily and essentially because President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo is a staunch believer in justice and equality before the law.
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