Judgment Debt Saga: Political actors pretended about details of the contract – ACEP

The Executive Director of the Africa Center for Energy Policy (ACEP), Ghana has reiterated that political actors in the Power Purchasing Agreement (PPA) between Government of Ghana and Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) just went to sleep after signing the contract.

Benjamin Boakye said for the conditions subsequent, the Government of Ghana were to assist the contractor to deliver those insisting the government was just negligent in the scheme of affairs.

“It was clear that we were just negligent; we just went to sleep. We were pretending we didn’t know we had conditions subsequent for which we can be held liable. They were just moving around playing games and not paying attention to what the potential liability could be on the state and that is where we are. I think if we had paid attention to the contract and understood our liabilities, we wouldn’t have cancelled it,” he said on News File Saturday.

Meanwhile, a US-based Ghanaian lawyer and a Professor in Accounting, Stephen Kwaku Asare says the Attorney General(AG) and the foreign law firms- Omnia Strategy and Volterra Fietta, should be held accountable for the $164 million judgment debt awarded against Ghana.

“I just do not understand why we do these things to ourselves,” he bemoaned, blaming these entities for the ‘inexcusable’ delay.

“We have an Attorney-General Department. We have hired and paid two foreign law firms, Omnia Strategy and Volterra Fietta.

“Yet, we fell asleep and did not take advantage of the 28-day window afforded us to challenge the arbitration panel’s decision that we should pay $170M to GPGC for terminating a contract,” Prof. Stephen Kweku Asare said in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

A United Kingdom Court says it is too late for Ghana to appeal against a US $164 million judgment debt awarded against it for wrongfully terminating the contract of an independent power producer, Ghana Power Generation Company (GPGC) Limited.

The contract was initially worth US$ 24.9 million per annum over the contract period of four years, making US$99.6 million.

The government failed to apply and set aside the January 26, 2021 decision of the London-based United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) Tribunal.

Rather, it turned up at a London Commercial Court with two excuses as impediments–the country’s 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections and that some key officials in the Attorney General’s Office contracted coronavirus.