Martin Amidu the former Special Prosecutor has accused the Ghanaian President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of interfering in the prosecution of some selected Members of Parliament accused of taking double salaries in exchange that the alleged culprits will cooperate with his government in parliament.
According to Mr Amidu, although the Attorney General then, Gloria Akuffo and the Director of Public Prosecutions had both perused the case docket and had come to the conclusion that charges be filed against some of the lawmakers, the President ordered them to stop.
Mr Amidu in a statement noted that: “This view is consistent with the clear unconstitutional usurpation of the independent exercise of prosecutorial discretion of the Attorney General by President Nana Akufo-Addo in his response to a question asked by Kweku Dawuro of Kingdom FM on the government’s fight against corruption on 13th December 2019, particularly the prosecution of the double salaries and other criminal cases. The President unconstitutionally assumed the status of the Attorney General of Ghana and shockingly said, inter alia, on the members of parliament double salary cases as follows:
‘…The double salary and members of parliament: it is not a straightforward allegation of misappropriation that some people think. There is a whole lot of double counting, to what extent people were taking money vis- a-vis the emolument of the article 70 and all that, and I am thinking that unless the thing is really clear cut and it has not been made quite clear to me, to rein a whole lot of parliamentarians and the list is quite a lot, to rein a whole lot of parliamentarians on a fifty -fifty case, for myself I don’t think that we will be doing the public interest of our country any service in that way. So the process of seeing to what extent the set off can be, there is been ongoing, there is a group doing that work and when they finish we be in a position to let the country know what the final outcome of the double salary thing is….’”
According to the 1992 constitution the prosecutorial powers of the Republic of Ghana is vested in the Attorney-General who is professionally responsible for prosecutorial decisions made on a non-partisan basis.
However, the former Special Prosecutor said having served as Deputy Attorney General and Attorney General for almost 14 years he can testify to the fact that no Head of State or President ever sought to direct or interfere with the prosecutorial discretion of the Attorney General during that period but President Akufo-Addo’s response at the media encounter of 13th December 2019 was the first time he heard a President “unashamedly and publicly usurping an independent prosecutorial constitutional discretion of an Attorney General.”
He noted that the allusion by President Akufo-Addo to a group performing the constitutional duties of the Attorney General to enable him to decide, and “be in a position to let the country know what the final outcome of the double salary thing is…” shows beyond every reasonable doubt the interfering role of President Akufo-Addo in the administration of criminal justice in deciding who must or must not be prosecuted for crime and not the Attorney General.
In Mr Amidu’s view, “the Attorney General regrettably became a poodle of the President by ceding his or her constitutional prosecutorial mandate to the usurping President”.
Mr Amidu said these in reaction to claims on Accra-based Oman FM and a publication by the Daily Guide Network to the effect that he was in charge of prosecuting the lawmakers found culpable of taken double salaries but was unable to prosecute them before resigning from office.
According to Mr Amidu, the Office of the Attorney General never transferred the docket to his office for prosecution for him to have failed or refused to prosecute same before his resignation.
Mr Amidu described the allegation as “a politically inspired propaganda against my integrity which sought to link my resignation to the failure or refusal of this irredeemably corrupt Government for four whole years to deal with the simple offence of double salary or stealing (as the Criminal Investigations Department of the Police Service put it), are false, infantile and barefaced lies intentionally concocted and put out by the Office of the Attorney-General to the unsuspecting public under the sub-heading ‘Godfred Yeboah-Dame.’”
“The effigy of the Attorney-General published alongside the concocted falsehoods of me resigning without prosecuting a case which was never handled by my office during my tenure as the Special Prosecutor demonstrates how shamefully low the hitherto respected ethical Office of the Attorney-General which I had the privilege of serving in for over fourteen years of my career has descended into since 7th January 2021,” he added.
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