William Kissi Agyebeng, the Special Prosecutor, has concluded that the revenue assurance contract between the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and SML (Strategic Mobilisation Ghana Limited) was unnecessary.
According to him, the contract was shrouded in systemic breaches of public financial regulations and abuse of official power, which caused financial loss to the state.
Addressing the media in a detailed report generated from its investigations on the matter Thursday, October 30, 2025, Mr. Kissi Agyebeng noted that the details surrounding the contract indicated there was “no genuine need” for it.
“There was no genuine need for contracting SML for the obligations it’s purported to perform,” he stated.
He explained that the contract, which was aimed at providing revenue assurance services in the petroleum, mining, and liquid bulk distribution (LBD) sectors, lacked a legitimate operational requirement.
The Office of the Special Prosecutor’s (OSP) probe, Mr. Agyebeng says, revealed that the contracts were not based on merit but rather “secured for SML through self-serving official patronage, sponsorship [and] promotion based on false and unverified claims.”
He said the deal did not follow Ghana’s public financial laws, but were characterised by “egregious statutory breaches”, due to “mandatory prior approvals were wantonly disregarded by relevant officials who acted with increased and emboldened impunity.”
He added that the Public Financial Management Act, 2016 (Act 921) and the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663), which govern major government contracts, were allegedly disregarded.
This, he averred, represented a serious contravention of the established legal framework designed to safeguard state assets.
Again, the investigations, the OSP says, revealed that payments were made to SML without recourse to the nation’s public financial management system responsible for oversight and accountability.
He said “there was no established financial management system of monitoring and verification to ensure that the Republic was obtaining the value for the money it was paying to SML.”
Mr. Kissi Agyebeng stated further that the investigation concluded that the payments to SML were set on an “automatic mode, detached from actual performance”, resulting in “causing financial loss to the public”.
This means that instead of measuring the work of SML and pay them, they were rather paid based on a calendar schedule, indicating a severe failure in contract management and oversight within the GRA and the Ministry of Finance.
It is expected that the OSP initiates prosecution against the persons implicated the matter.
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