{"id":669250,"date":"2019-08-01T05:58:06","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T05:58:06","guid":{"rendered":"<br><div>\n<p>A former Power Minister, Kwabena Donkor is blaming the Finance Ministry for the Power Distribution Services\u2019 (PDS) concession agreement debacle.<\/p>\n<p>According to him, the Ministry played a leading role in the signing of the agreement with "},"modified":"2019-08-01T05:58:06","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T05:58:06","slug":"blame-finance-ministry-for-pds-concession-debacle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2019\/08\/01\/blame-finance-ministry-for-pds-concession-debacle\/","title":{"rendered":"Blame Finance Ministry for PDS concession debacle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>A former Power Minister, Kwabena Donkor is blaming the Finance Ministry for the Power Distribution Services\u2019 (PDS) concession agreement debacle.<\/p>\n<p>According to him, the Ministry played a leading role in the signing of the agreement with the sector minister being the one who appended his signature to finalize the deal.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking on <strong>Citi TV\u2019s<\/strong> <strong>The Point of View<\/strong>, Kwabena Donkor said the Energy Ministry is also culpable for the ensuing debacle.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cThe first person that we have to hold responsible for this debacle is the Minister of Finance, the compact was signed by the Minister of Finance not the Minister of Energy. The Minister of Energy has sectoral oversight over ECG and others. MiDA falls under the office of the President.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>He also said the Attorney General\u2019s Office, the principal legal advisor to government, also failed to do due diligence before allowing the deal to go through.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cThose who are culpable are, the Finance Minister who signed the whole compact, not necessarily this Finance Minister, the Energy Minister [his office] and then the Attorney General. The Attorney General is the government\u2019s chief legal advisor,\u201d he stressed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The government on Tuesday decided to suspend a concessionary agreement with PDS for distribution of power in Ghana, with immediate effect following what it said was the discovery \u201cof fundamental and material breaches of PDS\u2019 obligation in the provision of Payment Securities (Demand Guarantees).<\/p>\n<p>Details of the alleged breach revealed that the guarantee presented by PDS was fraudulently procured.<\/p>\n<p>The Minister for Information said government\u2019s due diligence led to the discovery of the breach and that further investigations were being carried out to determine the final action on the matter.<\/p>\n<p>But Kwabena Donkor dispelled the claims that the discovery of the breach was due to government\u2019s diligence.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"PDS making arrangements to set up a power court to prosecute power theft\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/RD1COk-CxrY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>He said government rather acted sluggishly upon a tip-off earlier in July when their attention was drawn to the possible breach.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cWe [Ghana] did not discover this as a result of any due diligence. We were given a tip off on the 16th of July that these documents that have been produced as bank guarantee was fictitious and that the gentleman who is purported to have signed it, did not have the capacity to sign.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Kwabena Donkor, who is also the Member of Parliament for the Pru East constituency revealed that the Minority in Parliament in 2018 made consistent demands on the government to produce the guarantees for the PDS deal however government failed to do so.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\u201cWe insisted on they producing the guarantees, last year, for us to sight the guarantees. The Government of Ghana [Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Finance] ignored our request.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A former Power Minister, Kwabena Donkor is blaming the Finance Ministry for the Power Distribution Services\u2019 (PDS) concession agreement debacle. According to him, the Ministry played a leading role in the signing of the agreement with the sector minister being the one who appended his signature to finalize the deal. Speaking on Citi TV\u2019s The [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":669251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lifestyle"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Blame Finance Ministry for PDS concession debacle - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2019\/08\/01\/blame-finance-ministry-for-pds-concession-debacle\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Blame Finance Ministry for PDS concession debacle - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"A former Power Minister, Kwabena Donkor is blaming the Finance Ministry for the Power Distribution Services\u2019 (PDS) concession agreement debacle. 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