Ownership information to be made public
The government wants to review the amended Companies Act to incorporate a clause for a mandatory disclosure of beneficiary ownership information before it is eventually passed into law.
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Although the present draft bill of the amended Companies Act made provision for a register to be established for beneficiary ownership information, the Deputy Minister of Energy Dr Mohammed Amin Adam, said that register was not to be made public.
For this reason, he said the government was taking deliberate steps to make a provision in the amendment bill which would allow the register to be made public.
At a session of the Africa Open Data Conference on (July 18) in Accra, Dr Adam stated: “I have been part of meetings held by Vice-President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia to which he is demanding a review to make provision which will allow the register of the beneficiary ownership information to be made public.”
“Although we did not succeed in getting the beneficiary ownership information into the Petroleum Exploration and Production Law (E&P),” Dr Adam observed that the government had decided to make a provision in the regulations formulated to implement the E&P.
To this effect, he said the government was presently seeking the input of key stakeholders, civil society organisations and the citizenry in general to develop a draft document to serve as a guide to implement the E&P.
Competitive public tender
“Under a competitive public tender process our laws now allow us to use in the allocation of petroleum right,” he said, “one of the requirement of prequalification was to provide information of beneficiary ownership.”
The benefit, he observed was not to duplicate what the Companies Law intends to address but to ensure that foreign companies register before they could undertake petroleum activity.
“When these foreign companies come to participate in a tender, the information they provide to serve as a prequalification requirement can now be crossed checked with the information they provided in the beneficiary ownership information,” he said.
Dr Adam explained that this would help the citizenry to cross check to ascertain whether there were any violations during the contracting process.
He expressed the commitment of the government to set-up value for money unit at the Public Procurement Authority in order to ensure due diligence in every public procurement.
“It was important to recognise that the disclosure of information does not lead for value for money in public procurement.”
“Since we assume office, we declared that we are closing the doors to competitive tendering because selective tendering has been largely abused and, therefore, open and competitive tender will now be the new line of action,” the minister added.
Dismiss BOST MD
The Co-Chair of the Ghana Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, GHEITI, Dr Steve Manteaw shares a different opinion, saying successive government had not shown enough commitment to bring openness and transparency in contracting process.
He explained that if the present government was truly committed to ensure contract goes through competitive tendering process, the Managing Director (MD) of Bulk Oil Storage and Transportation (BOST), Mr Alfred Obeng Boateng should have been dismissed.
This, he said, was because the selling of the five million litres of the contaminated fuel to Movenpina was done through a selective tendering process and this was clearly contrary to the government’s position on tendering.
According to him, the citizenry are still not getting the full benefit of contracts disclosure because successive governments had not done enough to legitimise beneficiary ownership information.
“Making sure that contracts are awarded based on prior performance, best value for money, and in the interest of the taxpayers requires a fair and open selection process. It can be difficult to see who the real winners of public contracts are and where the money goes.”
Given that public contracting is the government’s biggest corruption risk, it is critical to bring open contracting data and beneficial ownership information together to make sure we can identify who won which public contracts, for how much and whether those services were actually delivered.—GB