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General News of Wednesday, 9 December 2015
Source: citifmonline.com
Tsatsu Tsikata, former CEO of GNPC
A former Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Tsatsu Tsikata, has rejected claims that he run down the company after managing it for several years.
Mr. Tsikata insisted that the company had a lot of assets before he was removed from office.
The GNPC incurred judgment debt in a hedging transaction with French multinational bank, Societe Generale which the state had to sell its drill Ship to defray.
In an exclusive interview on Eyewitness News, the former GNPC boss insisted that it will be disingenuous for anybody to rate the success of the corporation under his watch based on its liabilities alone.
He argued that claims that he left the company in debt “is not an acceptable allegation in my mind and its not acceptable for some obvious reasons.”
“The GNPC that was said to have been left in such a terrible state, that GNPC is a GNPC that owned the asset like Discoverer 511 which was sold, even at that time, according to what we are told by those involved in that transaction, was sold for $24 million. That is a GNPC that was said to be completely run down? If you look at any company and all that you are interested in is liability without looking at assets, you can say anything you like. That same GNPC owned interests like interest in Airtel which we were involved in funding. That Airtel was a company in relation to which a transaction which value was said to be a $120 million was engaged in, that was a GNPC asset.”
Tsatsu Tsikata also denied that he engaged in bad investments at the GNPC which led to the 19 million dollar debt to Société Générale.
He argued that they had “evidence” and “tapes” which implied that the case could go in the favour of GNPC.
“Société Générale had told our lawyers that a settlement was going to be possible and they had now reduced the claim that they were making from over 40 million to about 12 million,” he added.
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