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Ghana�s sole multi-purpose aluminum smelting company the Volta Aluminum Company (VALCO) is almost certainly the next state facility on the auctioneer�s list going for a song, after a litany of others including Ghana Telecom and Merchant Bank changed ownership, Despite a flurry of protestation from concerned citizens. Last week, The General Telegraph learned that long meetings were on-going in Accra�s Ridge with some British in attendance, just days after Valco boss Dr. Charles Mensah returned from East Africa where he attended a roundtable meeting of regional brains in the industry. It is understood that Dr. Mensah and his team of administrators are vehemently opposed to the sale, but government sources have hinted that the cost of generating power is soaring to the nostrils of heaven and that, doing away with the company would be a most useful testament to clearing economic waste in the system. The General Telegraph has been told that while all its counterparts elsewhere in the West Indies are doing fairly well, Ghana�s has always suffered hiccups of some sort which drove NDC (2) under President J.J. Rawlings to develop cold feet towards the facility, until President J.A. Kufuor moved every sinew in his government�s economic frame to rescue it from drifting away into the doldrums. Built by the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) back in the early days of the nation�s independence in the late 1950s, the facility had been a most useful contributor to power generation until the dying embers of the 1990s, when it faced the combined effects of rippling economic bashing. As days roll into weeks and weeks roll into months, The General Telegraph waits rather patiently with bated breath exactly how issues will pan out eventually, vis-�-vis the contentious one of the immediate past (Merchant Bank) whose volatile fumes are yet to vamoose upwards into the gray skies.