Flashback: Stop talking, start prosecuting – Kwaku Asare to Amidu

Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare in August 2018 tasked the then-Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu, to rather focus on investigating and prosecuting government officials who were engaged in corrupt practices instead of releasing epistles.

In a Facebook post, Prof. Asare told the SP to “Cut down on the epistles and up the prosecutions.”



Read full article Read the full story originally published on August 28, 2018, on Ghanaweb

A US-based Ghanaian law professor, Kwaku Asare, has asked Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu, to focus on his core mandate of investigating and prosecuting corrupt public officials and stop writing articles to complain about happenings in the Ghanaian society.

According to Professor Asare, a recent article in which Mr Amidu raised issues about some suspicious money deposited into his personal account by his judgment debtor, was needless since the payment was not illegitimate.

According to Mr Amidu, his account balance as of 3 August 2018, skyrocketed by “more than five-fold”.

“On 3rd August 2018, I was amazed when I went to one of the branches of my Bank to make a cash withdrawal by cheque from my current account only to be informed that the balance to my credit on the account had leaped more than five-fold from my last balance on 7th July 2018. My account had been credited on 19th July 2018 with a transferred payment,” his article stated.

The anti-corruption campaigner said he was alarmed by the development, and to protect his integrity, immediately ordered the branch manager to return the money to wherever it came from.

“Upon receipt of my letter of 4th August 2018 my Bank immediately reversed the transfer and returned the suspicious transaction to the transferor, asking him to explain the transaction and replied to my letter with an apology indicating the steps it had taken upon receiving my objections.”

Mr. Amidu, however, in the article, said he, after a letter demanding explanations for the suspicious money, found out that the amount was in favour of a court judgment he won in September 2014.

“It turned out that without giving me a payment advice notice to alert me of the fulfillment of an order of the High Court in respect of the Judgment and Orders of the High Court in my favour dated 4th September 2014, one of the agencies affected by the court orders had unilaterally transferred that sum of money into my current account.”

Commenting on this on his Facebook page, Prof Asare said: “I do not understand the Special Prosecutor’s insistence that a bank should seek a customer’s consent before crediting her account with a transfer.

“Further, he says that after investigation he found that the deposit was a legitimate one from his judgment debtor so why punish the bank for crediting his account with a legitimate transfer? “I am struggling to find the point of this epistle on strange bank transfers when he could be ‘epistling’ us on the criminal dockets that he has prepared on the faux bankers who embezzled our deposits thereby willfully causing financial loss to the State. Cut down on the epistles and up the prosecutions!”