Manasseh Azure Awuni is an award-winning investigative journalist
Award-winning investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni has given supposed details of the revenue assurance contracts Strategic Mobilisation Ghana Ltd. (SML) had with the government of Ghana, which have now been cancelled following an order from President John Dramani Mahama.
Speaking in an interview with JoyNews over the weekend, Manasseh Azure refuted a claim by SML that its contracts with the government were performance-based.
According to him, per the contract details, the company was charging the country a fixed amount of money for the revenue assurance service it was rendering.
In the upstream petroleum sector, for instance, he said that the company was charging GHp5 for every litre of fuel Ghanaians purchased.
“They were taking a fixed percentage from whatever we input. It’s like a tax. If anybody bought petroleum products, if you pump any litre of fuel into your car, anywhere in this country, as soon as the fuel came through into the system, SML was entitled to GHp5 per litre.
“And that five pesewas may seem very small until you multiply it by the hundreds of millions and billions of litres we consume in a year,” he said.
The journalist also stated that SML was making a fixed percentage of money for all the oil and gold Ghana was producing.
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“Go to the gold mining sector. SML was entitled under the contract Ofori-Atta masterminded to a fixed percentage – that is, 0.75% of total production of minerals. And this year, we are getting billions of dollars because gold prices are going up, and mineral prices are going up. It is a fixed percentage.
“Go to the downstream, where we produce petroleum. The contract said every barrel of oil Ghana produced, SML should be entitled to $0.75 per barrel. It may look small, but at the time, we’re producing up to 160,000 barrels a day. This means the company will be making at least $121,000 every single day we produce oil,” he said.
Watch a video of his remarks below:
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