Angry Adongo Storms Out Of "Rubber Stamp" Bank Probe

Member of Parliament for Bolgatanga Central Constituency, Isaac Adongo, has boycotted parliament’s probe into the collapse of some seven local banks.

Parliament scheduled Wednesday, 5 September 2018 to begin investigations into the circumstances that led to the collapse of the banks.

However, Mr Adongo, a member of the Finance Committee of Parliament decided to walk out of the first meeting.

According to him, the parliamentary probe is “a rubber stamp process, it will deliver no value [and] I am not willing to be part of it”.

The Minority MP pointed out that the documents that the committee members were given were statements from the banking sector and press releases by the Bank of Ghana (BoG).

He further stated that documents from audit firm, KPMG, only contain conditions and opinions on uniBank.

“There were five asset quality reviews at uniBank, there were four of them in one month; we don’t even have the report. They claim that there was a preliminary work done by KPMG to take a decision to go into it [but] we don’t have that report,” he added.

He further revealed that the committee members do not know the terms of reference of the job that KPMG did, and “we don’t even know the full report of Boulders [Advisors], except an executive summary of Boulders’ work”.

For him, the committee has not been provided with all the relevant documents and other materials to constitute an independent and credible work, hence his decision not to “take part in rubber stamp meetings”.

Officials of the BoG and the Finance Ministry are expected to be questioned by parliament’s Finance Committee about the roles they played in the collapse of the banks.

In August 2017, UT Bank and Capital Bank went under, and all their assets and liabilities were taken over by state-owned GCB Bank.

A year later, Consolidated Bank Ghana (CBG) Limited was formed after the central bank fused the Sovereign Bank, The Construction Bank, The Beige Bank, The Royal Bank and uniBank together after they all ran into liquidity problems.

Chairman of the Finance Committee, Dr Mark Assibey Yeboah, had told Class News earlier that the committee will meet first with PricewaterhouseCoopers and then with KPMG and then the new Consolidated Bank officials.

On Friday, the committee will meet other regulators like the Security and Exchanges Commission and the National Insurance Commission.

Dr Assibey noted that: “We have to get firsthand information, we cannot rely on media commentaries to make informed opinions, so, we’re meeting with the institutions.”