Ghanaians should be grateful to Akufo-Addo for collapsing banks – Otchere-Darko

Private legal practitioner and a leading member of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko says Ghanaians should be grateful to President Akufo-Addo and the Bank of Ghana (BoG) for collapsing some banks in the country.

According to him, the measures put in place by the government and the President are the reasons why depositors’ funds were guaranteed.

Speaking on the Good Evening Ghana show, Mr. Otchere-Darko said the decision to close down these banks was in the interest of Ghanaians.

He noted “I think we should be grateful that the government had the courage, the bank of Ghana had the integrity and the decisiveness to take these decisions as difficult as it is and really losing an asset like a bank. It must be very difficult and I do not say this lightly because I know what those who built these banks have suffered but at the end of the day there is a bigger picture.”

“If you had GH 12 billion cedis as a President, would you use it to rescue banks that didn’t need it or you would use it to fulfill your manifesto promises, ” he quizzed host of the show, Paul Adom Otchere.

He believes any government that had a long list of manifesto pledges would rather close these banks and use that GH12 billion cedis for a national railway network project instead of investing in already crippling banks.

Mr. Otchere-Darko further argued that the government did not collapse these banks adding that Ghanaians should critically examine the factors that led to the collapse of these banks in order to appreciate the decision to collapse the banks.

He explained, “An instance where there were about five related companies for one client and that client used three assets to secure three assets,  the value of those three assets were nowhere near any of the loans they were applying for the five related companies…those three assets were used as collateral for five related companies and those assets were not even a quarter the value of the loan, so the supervision of the banks credit committee failed.”