Maiden journal to enhance corporate insolvency landscape launched
THE Ghana Association of Restructuring and Insolvency Advisors (GARIA) has launched a journal to enhance the future of Ghana’s corporate insolvency and restructuring landscape.
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Dubbed: “Corporate Insolvency and Restructuring Journal”, it is designed to be the mouthpiece of Ghana's relatively young, but fast evolving insolvency and restructuring industry.
It seeks to shape a new culture that is more supportive of business rescues and the restructuring and insolvency practice going forward.
The maiden edition of the journal features 11 articles by eminent academics, practitioners and others from Ghana, Canada, Nigeria and South Africa.
Launching the journal in Accra, the Second Deputy Governor, Bank of Ghana (BoG), Elsie Addo Awadzi, said the journal, which was the first in Ghana, joined the ranks of insolvency journals around the world.
The launch of the journal forms part of activities to mark this year’s GARIA week celebration on the theme: “Leveraging Restructuring and Business Rescue for Corporate Renewal: Turning Crisis into Opportunity and Growth.”
It was attended by a diverse audience, including lawyers, members of the judiciary, policy makers, academia, accountants and bankers.
She said: “GARIA is privileged under the Corporate Insolvency and Restructuring Act, 2020 (ACT 1015) to be recognised as the professional body for insolvency practitioners.
I felt that the next step would be for GARIA to start a mouthpiece for intellectual discourse, for intellectual workmanship in terms of helping to develop our jurisprudence and our practice in this area.”
The journal, she said, provides professionals in the corporate insolvency space a place to provide thought leadership on various issues pertaining to or affecting the practice of corporate insolvency and restructuring.
She said the journal would also lead and shape the public discourse when it comes to matters of corporate failures and such because sometimes the report around it has not been very charitable.
“By design, it is meant to be a disciplinary journal that educates and stimulates robust and objective discussions and incubates and cross fertilises ideas that help to strengthen Ghana's insolvency and restructuring industry.”
Importantly, we hope that this right now will shape the policy, legislative and jurisprudential underpinnings of a market-based economy as a country,” Mrs Awadzi noted.
Significance
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of GARIA, George Fosu, said the then Companies Act 1963 (Act 179) was quite inadequate to address the trajectory that Ghana was on in the context of its integration into the global economy.
He explained that the Companies Act and the Official Liquidation Bodies Corporate Act, 1963 (Act 180) provisions did not provide any room for resuscitating businesses that were viable but had incurred some sort of financial distress.
He added that journals were key in simplifying complex concepts and making them accessible to a broader audience, ensuring maximum readership and benefit.