Business News of Friday, 30 November 2018
Source: citibusinessnews.com
2018-11-30
Dr. John Ofori-Tenkorang, Director General of SSNIT
The Director General of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust Dr. John Ofori-Tenkorang has disclosed that even though SSNIT had shares in four out the five banks that were collapsed into the Consolidated Bank Ghana Limited, it made no losses.
This he said was due to securities it had which allowed SSNIT to easily convert some assets of the company into money as the banks loss their licenses.
Five banks, namely the Beige Bank, Construction Bank, Unibank, Royal Bank, and Sovereign Bank were collapsed by the Bank of Ghana to form the Consolidated Bank due to their high levels of insolvencies.
Speaking at a press soiree, Dr. Ofori-Tenkorang debunked the notion that pension funds were lost due to the collapse of the banks.
“Our level of exposure with the banks that went down is zero. Whatever money that we had on placement with them we had security assets that we were holding and so we are able to raise cash against those securities so we don’t have any exposure. That was with Consolidated. We had four banks in Consolidated Bank that we had exposures to,” he said.
Dr. Ofori-Tenkorang stated that SSNIT has always been strategic in its investments to protect pension funds.
Background
Consolidated Bank Ghana (CBG) was created out of the five collapsed indigenous banks, namely uniBank, Royal Bank, Beige, Sovereign and Construction Bank, is set to close down 98 branches.
Altogether, the defunct banks had 191 branches. But after an initial assessment, management of CBG has decided to keep only 93 branches inherited from the collapsed banks.