BoG Governor’s ‘recklessness’, ‘mismanagement’ cost taxpayer $6bn – ‘twice the IMF bailout we’re struggling, sacrificing for – NDC

The Bank of Ghana’s “staggering” loss of GHS60.8 billion, per the Auditor-General’s 2022 report, which is equivalent to $6 billion, the main opposition National Democratic Congress has computed.

 

“This is twice the amount [$3 billion] we are to receive from our recent IMF bailout”, Minority Leader Dr Cassiel Ato Forson told journalists on Tuesday, 8 August 2023 at the party’s ‘Moment of Truth’ press conference.

“This means, the recklessness and mismanagement of the Governor of the Bank of Ghana has cost the nation twice what we are struggling and sacrificing to receive from the IMF amid major conditionalities”, Dr Forson analysed.

Apart from the GHS60.8 billion loss, the bank also recorded a negative equity of over GHS55.1 billion.

“What this simply means”, Dr Forson explained to the layperson, ‘is that the Bank of Ghana is insolvent”.

“In other words, the once prestigious Bank of Ghana, the mother of all banks in Ghana, has been bankrupted and collapsed by this NPP economic management team led by Dr Mahamudu Bawumia with the complicity of the Governor of the Central Bank”, he alleged and accused.

The former deputy finance minister also said after central bank’s “dastardly act of over-lending to the government”, “they then proceeded to do the unthinkable – to write-off a whopping GHS48.4 billion, about half of Ghana Government’s indebtedness to the Central Bank, without parliamentary approval”.

“This is illegal and criminal and the NDC Members of Parliament will not allow this to pass”.