Attorney-General Advises Kan Dapaah...

The Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Dr. Benjamin Kumbour, has defended boycotting the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) sitting on Tuesday and has urged its chairman, Albert Kan-Dapaah to seek proper legal advice. The PAC chairman has threatened to subpoena the principal legal advisor of the government after failing to turn up at the committee�s sitting on Tuesday over a judgment debt payment to business man, Alfred Woyome. In an exclusive interview with Citi News, Dr. Kumbour maintained his actions were inspired by a Constitutional provision which the PAC Chairman has failed to recognise. �The intention the PAC chairman sought to create was that Parliament was autonomous and I wasn�t respecting Parliament,� he said. �I�ve been a Member of Parliament for eight years and I have a lot of respect for Parliament. We happen to find ourselves in a type of legal and constitutional situation that he [does not understand].� Dr. Kumbour advised Mr. Kan-Dapaah saying, �to be fair to him as a non lawyer, he needs to get a lawyer to advise him properly on what exactly he is doing. You don�t pick one isolated Article of the Constitution and use that as a basis of a legal opinion. When you pick just one Article of the 1992 Constitution and use that as the basis for his argument, he is making a major mistake.� He mentioned that the �Constitution has to be read as a whole. Is he aware that it is the same 1992 Constitution that requires that you do not get involved in prejudicial acts in which the cases are pending in court.� The Attorney General also accused the PAC chairman of personalising the Attorney General�s Department. �When you personalise an institution, then you are making a lot of major mistakes. The Attorney General is a constitutional office, it is not a Ben Kumbour office and so he should be talking more about the office and not Ben Kumbour. He doesn�t even have the information about the current circumstances of the Attorney General�s Department,� he said.