Subah “Irredeemably Incompetent Or Fatally Fraudulent” – Telecoms Chamber

The Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Telecoms Chamber is convinced Subah is either “irredeemably incompetent” or “fatally fraudulent” if the company still insists it monitored telcos to check their revenue inflows to help verify if they are paying the right taxes.

Kweku Sakyi Addo believes the Committee’s report exonerating Subah InfoSolutions from wrongdoing was prepared without the informed input of the Chamber.

The Subah saga is a story of how the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) entered into a contract with Subah InfoSolutions to do electronic monitoring of mobile networks to confirm whether they are being truthful in declaring all their taxes.

Under the contract, Subah was supposed to connect to the physical nodes of the telecom companies to monitor revenues that are supposed to be paid by the telcos, but this was not done.

But it was revealed that Subah InfoSolutions did not do this work and bagged Ghc74 million from 2010-2012.

However, a 14-member committee set up by the Ministry of Finance to investigate the deal branded fraudulent, said there was nothing wrong with the contract and rejected calls for it to be abrogated. But its work has been heavily criticized as being shoddy.

The committee is said to have been composed of at least three staff members of Subah without any representative from the Telecom Chamber.

Speaking on the Super Morning Show on Monday, Chief Executive Officer Kweku Sakyi Addo expressed dissatisfaction at how a committee could meet without inviting a single telecommunication company or the telecoms chamber.

This omission has resulted in a report which he stated “does not reflect the facts…perhaps if we had been invited by the committee we would have provided accurate information”.

He said Subah’s claim that telcos denied them access to their call data records could not be true because the telcos are not even aware of Subah’s existence until September 2013. A year after they claimed to have done a two-year monitoring.

“There has not been a single punctuation of correspondence [between Subah and the telcos]”.

He also rubbished Subah’s claim that following unsuccessful attempts to get Call Data Records from telcos, the company resorted to using CDRs obtained from the National Communications Authority (NCA).

But this claim would only expose Subah as incompetent because the data from NCA deals with international call records and not local records as their terms of reference demanded, Kweku Sakyi Addo asserted.

His described Subah’s claim as akin to “watching a game of cricket to analyze a game of football”.