<<Print>>

Embattled Deputy Attorney General Ebo Barton-Odro has denied ever stating that the government had no case prosecuting NDC businessman Alfred Agbesi Woyome for allegedly fleecing the country to the tune of over GH�51.2million in what was cleverly packaged as judgment debt. Mr Barton-Odro told DAILY GUIDE on the sidelines of a stakeholders� forum of legal reforms in Accra on Friday that his pronouncements on the case had been taken out of context. �All that I can say about this Woyome case is the fact that I have been quoted out of context,� he said. �We have two segments of that case; initially, the then Attorney General (Betty Mould Idrissu) settled with Mr. Woyome over terms of payment. Everything was set out and executed, and then the government defaulted in the installment payments, so he went to court, to enforce those instalment payments. People were agitating for the A-G to file a defense. That was the context that I was saying that we had no case,� Mr Barton Odro told DAILY GUIDE. �At the time, I thought we didn�t have a case because we had settled with the man,� he added. �Having settled with the man and agreed on terms of payment and having defaulted, you don�t need a good lawyer to tell you that you don�t have a good case there,� he stressed. When the judgment debt scandal broke last year, the deputy attorney general was widely condemned for having said that Ghana did not have a case against Mr. Woyome but EOCO investigations revealed that there were enough grounds for prosecution. Critics saw the deputy Attorney General�s position as conflicting with that of Martin Amidu who succeeded Betty as A-G and initiated measures to retrieve the money from Woyome, and said it had a tendency to influence the commitment of prosecutors working on the case. With the conflicting position of Mr Barton-Odro, critics called for his head. In fact, an additional deputy attorney general was last week appointed to support Barton-Odro in his duties, ending expectations that he would be relieved of his position for his stance on the Woyome case. Mr. Barton-Odro explained that the views he expressed when he said the government did not have a case was grossly misrepresented by the general public. �I was using the word �Defence�. Is it every case that the government and the A-G have to defend? If I were referring to the current one, I would have argued that is it every case that should be prosecuted?�