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Minority to boycott discussion on withdrawal of AMERI deal

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Politics of Wednesday, 18 October 2017

Source: citifmonline.com

2017-10-18

Parliament GhanawebParliament House

The Minority in Parliament will today [Wednesday], go ahead with a planned boycott of Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament’s deliberations on the urgent motion, filed to reverse the AMERI power agreement.

The boycott is due to the fact that the motion to withdraw the 2015 AMERI deal, was not debated in Parliament before being forwarded to the Mines and Energy committee.

The motion in question was brought before Parliament by K.T Hammond, the Adansi Asokwa NPP Member of Parliament.

The National Democratic Congress Minority has complained that the Speaker of Parliament, Professor Mike Oquaye, was disregarding the voice of the Minority, and now it is saying that the government wants to use them as ‘backdoor’ to cancel the deal.

Speaking to Citi News, the Minority Spokesperson on Mines and Energy, Adams Mutawakilu, said his side does not think that “Parliament can refer a motion when it has not been debated on, and we don’t want to set a bad precedent.”

He added that, the Minority also does not “want [the New Patriotic Party] government to use Parliament as the back door to rescind decisions that are effectively between the government and the company involved.”

Mr. Mutawakilu further stressed that, K.T. Hammond does not have the standing to use Parliament to rescind the $510 million agreement with AMERI.

“Once government approves an agreement without indicating in the approval that they still have a say in respect to the recession, Parliament cannot come later to rescind it. So we believe that, Parliament has no hands, and K.T Hammond cannot use Parliament to rescind a decision that has been approved, and based on that we will not take part,” he said.

The Minority staged a walk out of Parliament in August, over the Speaker’s decision to forward the motion to the Energy Committee without input from them.

K.T. Hammond, who was the ranking member of the Energy Committee of Parliament in 2015 when the deal was approved, filed an urgent motion seeking to reverse the deal because of his position that the deal was suspicious.

The John Mahama administration in 2015 agreed to rent the 300MW emergency power from AMERI at the peak of the country’s power crisis.

As part of the agreement, AMERI was to build the power plants and operate them for five years before transferring it to the government.

The deal received parliamentary approval on 20th March, 2015. It later emerged that the government may have been short-changed by AMERI as they presented an overpriced budget.

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