Despite establishing that the Board of Directors of the Electricity Company of Ghana cannot be surcharged for personally not committing any crime(s) against the state, they have been asked to resign on moral grounds.
Edward Ayambire Bawa, a Member of the Mines and Energy Committee in Parliament who is making the assertion says apart from the ECG lying to the entire nation about faulty transformers being the cause of the outages, it also defied the President’s directive of operating a single account and rather run a whooping 61 accounts, a model the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had equally advised against.
The Bongo lawmaker says their suspicion on the Company running multiple account stemmed from their refusal to allow PricewaterhouseCoopers access to their accounts when they were charged to audit their activities.
According to the MP, they had suspected the ECG was running about 37 accounts at the time, but turned out to be 61 per the documents they furnished the PURC afterwards.
Speaking on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, April 20, 2024, Mr. Bawa said although the law might render the PURC’s fine on the Directors illegal, the Board should not hold their office on the grounds of morality.
“By the IMF conditionality given to us, –because they have identified the energy sector as one of the greatest threats to our economy in terms of the level of indebtedness –had indicated that [the ECG should] have a single account such that anytime you take the revenues, we can follow the account in which these monies are put in.
“The President subsequently gives an order that, run a single account. When Price WaterhouseCoopers was contracted to audit the cash waterfall mechanism and the activities of the ECG, one of the things they did was that, they refused to make their bank account available to the auditor and it was one of the concerns that we raised. At that time, we thought that they were running around 37 accounts,” the MP had explained.
However, he said “per the documents that were presented by the ECG itself to the PURC, they were not running 37, they are running 61 accounts. That again is a clear violation of the directive of the President, the directive that has been given to us by the IMF and in fact the whole idea of the cash waterfall mechanism. On the strength of that, what business does the Board still have to be in the position? So, I agree that you may not be able to surcharge them per the law, but morally, they should not be occupying that office.”
The ECG and the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) have been having issues recently regarding an ongoing load-shedding which is known locally as ‘dumsor’. The Commission, whose responsibility it is, to seek the interest of consumers in ensuring that they given the best of services by public utilities, asked the Company to provide a timetable to guide the public on their dumsor schedule.
But, the ECG refused, indicating that the power outages were as a result of some planned maintenance which occurred as a result of some faulty transformers that were being replaced. The PURC fined the Board of Directors of the ECG GHC5.8million for failing to provide the timetable. Meanwhile, the Board says the fine is illegal since the PURC does not weird that mandate to fine it.
You can’t privatise ECG, VRA, GRIDCo for security reasons – Bawa
