<<Print>>

The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Madam Betty Mould-Iddrisu is clearly an unhappy woman and very upset at certain twists and turns arising out of a legal suit filed by former Board Member of the Bank of Ghana (BOG) and New Patriotic Party (NPP) stalwart, Sam Okudzeto. In a rare show of political bravado and cockiness, the usually calm and reserved Attorney General, speaking on Radio Gold�s �Alhaji and Alhaji� political talk-programme, unleashed a torrent of invectives as frustrations over Mr. Okudzeto�s suit boiled over. She accused the ace lawyer of being an egocentric; whiles she blustered that government �will use every arsenal in the legal array that they can muster to win the case.� �We have been fighting this case at the High Court, at the Court of Appeal and now he has taken us to the Supreme Court. We intend using every possible�.arsenal in the legal array that we can muster against him in order to win this case. It is inconceivable that any right thinking citizen of Ghana would wish to stay on in a Board just for his personal gratification. However much he wants to cloud it as it being a constitutional issue, an issue that must be put to the test, he knows more than anybody else the harm that he is doing to the BOG, and the nation at large, by not allowing the Board to be reconstituted. It is really in the worst possible case that any right thinking Ghanaian would do this,� an irritated Betty Mould-Iddrisu stated. President J.E.A. Mills soon after taking office dissolved the Boards of all state Institutions, agencies and other Parastatals including the Bank of Ghana. He subsequently reconstituted the Board appointing new members to replace Mr. Okudzeto and others. But the legal luminary, who was affected by the action since his tenure ends somewhere in April 2010, believes the president had no power to dissolve the Board of the Bank of Ghana and sought an order to restrain the president from swearing in the new members to the Board. In April, 2009, Mr. Sam Okudzeto commenced a suit against the government for wrongful dissolution of the Board of the Bank of Ghana. A member of the dissolved Board, Mr. Okudzeto said the action of the president amounted to a flagrant violation of the laws of the land. He therefore filed a writ at the Fast Track, seeking a declaration by the court that the action of the president was illegal, null and void. Mr. Okudzeto's legal action, it seems, is having a telling effect on the operations of the BOG and hampering the work of government, as any amount of money that has to be effected through the BOG for governance, has been stalled, for now. But Madam Mould-Iddrisu has the firm conviction that at the end of the day, government will win the case, since Mr. Okudzeto does not even have the �locus standi� to initiate the suit in the first instance. ��I�m sure that at the end of the day the law court will agree with us and award us the judgement that this government deserves for the people of Ghana�.I�m very convinced in my own mind that we�ve an excellent legal case, we�ve done a lot of work on this case, produced enough evidence to show that Sam Okudzeto himself doesn�t have the locus standi, the capacity to bring this action�.it�s a case that involves the national interest so we�re justifiably rather upset at the twist and turns of this matter,�