GNPC drill ship sold without knowledge of officials

• Posted on September 12, 2013
• by Nana Kwesi Coomson
• Comment

Officials of the Bank Of Ghana and the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation(GNPC) have failed to present documents for the sale of GNPC’s drill ship, Discoverer 511 and the payment of $19.5 million dollars to Societe Generale. 

The judgment debt was in respect to a failed agreement which the then GNPC Chief Executive, Tsatsu Tsikata, signed between the outfit and Societe Generale in the early 1990s. 

Per the agreement, GNPC, on the advice of the Societe Generale, entered into some derivative transactions in the 1990s.

But in 1999 the Societe General sued GNPC in a London court to recover debt owed it by the state-owned oil company resulting from the transaction.

The Chief Executive of the GNPC, Nana Boakye Asafo-Adjei and the Chief Manager with the Banking Department of the Bank of Ghana, Paul Mensah-Ashun who were subpoenaed by the Sole Commissioner over the same issue, could not produce the documents needed to the commission.

First to appear before the commission was Chief Manager with the Banking Department of the Bank of Ghana, Paul Mensah–Ashun who explained that the Bank of Ghana has no documents backing the payment.

“My Lord we have queried our data base extensively and there is nothing that shows that some payments were made to Societe General in respect of the sale of the GNPC ship. So for this particular case that we are talking about, there is nothing that we can trace about that transaction” he said.

However, the Chief Executive Officer of the GNPC, Nana Boakye Asafu-Adjeye explained that his outfit was not involved in the sale of the said ship.

“I am not sure who sold the drill ship actually, it was not sold by GNPC but we received that letter that we submitted from the Ministry of Energy that it had been sold” he said.

When Mr. Asafu-Adjeye was queried about the reasons why the GNPC’s drill ship could be sold without their knowledge, Mr. Asafu-Adjeye said, “well to be frank it will be difficult for me to comment on that because at that time I was not the CEO” adding that he was not in the known.



By: Winnifred P. Ndamse