Babgin Fights Back

The Works and Housing Minister, Alban Sumana Kingsford Bagbin, has been explaining circumstances under which he asked the Board of the State Housing Company (SHC) to ensure that the company�s Managing Director (MD), Mark Nii Akwei Ankrah was reinstated though the latter had been found liable of gross abuse of office. Hon. Bagbin, in an interview with Daily Guide, said he had clean hands and that he only called for the reinstatement of Mr. Ankrah because the three-member committee that looked into allegations leveled against him recommended that the MD be called back to his position. �It was an independent committee that looked into the twelve allegations raised against him and eventually asked that he should resume duty. I only acted on the report by first writing to the Presidency and attaching a copy of the report and then writing to the Board of SHC to ask them to call him back. �I did not do anything untoward and if you say what I did amounts to stomaching corrupt practices then you are not being fair to me. I have earned a reputation that I would not allow it to be soiled by any pittance or any dirty thing thrown at me. I do not know any of the persons involves and I acted in good faith,� the Minister stated. Daily Guide had reported that though an investigative committee had established that Mr. Ankrah abused his office in a conflict of interest situation and also gotten involved in the double sale of lands at Fafraha as well as the reckless sale of a government bungalow at Labone, he had been called back to work and some of the whistle blowers rather deployed to other offices. The story also had it that Bagbin had shelved the committee�s report from the Presidency. But the Minister said that he acted in the best interest of the SHC because the said officer, who was redeployed from SHC to the Works and Housing Ministry, would have created more problems if he was made to remain at his original post. �If you had read the Committee report you would have observed that they themselves had recommended that the best option of ensuring peace at the SHC is to redeploy the Director of Administration in particular, as his posture portrays him as someone who will continue to pose a problem to whoever will be appointed MD of the company. I only acted on that report and asked that he be redeployed to my ministry,� Mr. Bagbin explained. Credible documents sighted by Daily Guide revealed that Mr. Ankrah, barely two weeks after his appointment as Managing Director of SHC, received a letter from a company known as Phf International Housing Consultancy (PhFI) where he was the immediate-past Chief Executive Officer seeking to be in partnership with SHC. The letter, dated February 17, 2010, was on the official letter head of PhFI which had the name of Mr. Ankrah as Chief Executive at the bottom of the page. Meanwhile, the letter was specifically addressed to Mr. Ankrah requesting a partnership with SHC. Mr. Ankrah indeed went ahead to offer the partnership deal to PhFI, according to documents sighted and the committee�s report. On the allegation of the sale of a government house at Labone in Accra, the committee�s decision was that all transactions on the house should be halted while further investigations were carried out. It also noted that �a more serious problem of the transactions on house No. 40, North Labone Estates, unearthed during our investigations, was the fraudulent manner in which that house, which is strongly believed to belong to the government, was going to be transferred to a private individual.� The 23-page final report of the committee also stated on page 11 that �Mr. Mark Nii Akwei Ankrah had indulged in double sale of land at Fafraha near Adenta in Accra.� The report disclosed that incidentally Mr. Ankrah personally chaired all the meetings of the Encroachment and Penalty Committee that authorized the sale of the land to two different persons for different amounts and at different dates.