Commission resumes hearing on drill ship today
The mystery surrounding the sale of a Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) drill ship in 2001 and the proceeds thereof is set to be unravelled as three key persons connected with the transaction appear before the Judgement Debt Commission today and tomorrow.
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A Minister of Energy in the Kufuor administration, Mr Albert Kan-Dapaah, and his deputy, Mr K. T. Hammond, under whose stewardship the drill ship was sold to offset GNPC’s indebtedness to Societe Generale (SG) will make an appearance today.
Afterwards, a former Chief Executive Officer of the GNPC, Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, under whose tenure the corporation entered into an agreement with and incurred the indebtedness to SG, will take his turn tomorrow.
The ‘Three Musketeers’ are expected to take the commission through the minutest details of the mysterious adventure of Discoverer 511 in respect of its seizure, the court judgement secured by SG in London for the sale of the ship to recover its debt and the whereabouts of the balance of proceeds from the sale after SG had been paid off.
Sale of drill ship
The GNPC sold the Discoverer 511 for $24 million in 2001 to settle a judgement debt of $19.5 million awarded to SG by a court in London.
The judgment debt was in respect of a failed agreement which had been signed between the GNPC and SG in the early 1990s.
Under the agreement, the GNPC, on the advice of SG, entered into some derivative transactions in the 1990s but the transaction resulted in a debt to SG, and in 1999 the multinational French bank sued GNPC at a London High Court to recover the debt.
However, after selling off Discoverer 511 to pay off the debt of $19.5 million, it was not clear where the balance of $3.5 million was lodged and efforts by the Judgement Debt Commission to track same have not yielded the desired results.
No trace of money
So far, witnesses appearing before the commission, including officials of the GNPC, the Bank of Ghana and SG, have not been able to provide concrete information in respect of the circumstances leading to the sale of Discoverer 511 and the proceeds from the sales.
An official of the SG had told the commission that the company could not trace the GNPC drill ship deal, suggesting that the documents in question might have been disposed of because in France the law permits companies to discard documents after 10 years.
The Managing Director of SG Ghana Limited, Mr Gilbert Hie, had told the commission in September that the company did not have any document on its transaction with the GNPC and the judgement debt it secured from the court in London.
He explained that per French law, documents were supposed to be kept for a maximum of 10 years, after which a company could dispose of them.
Kan-Dapaah
Mr Kan-Dapaah officially volunteered to appear before the commission when he wrote and submitted a letter to the Sole Commissioner, Mr Justice Yaw Apau, to that effect.
His decision to voluntarily submit to the probing of the commission followed intriguing revelations at the commission on the mysterious circumstances under which the drill ship was sold and the proceeds thereof unaccounted for.
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