The board members of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) that supervised the company’s clear violation of the cash waterfall mechanism (CWM) and the President and the IMF directives to run a single account have no moral grounds to occupy their office, Edward Bawa, MP for Bongo, has said.
According to the member of the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament, the power distributor refused to make its accounts available to audit firm Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) for audit.
Mr. Bawa revealed that according to ECG’s documents it submitted to PURC, the power distributor is running 61 accounts instead of a single account, as the IMF advised and a subsequent order from President Akufo-Addo.
“IMF had indicated that you have a single account such that anytime you take the revenues, we can follow the account where the money is put; the President subsequently gives an order that to run a single account.
“When PwC [Price Waterhouse Coopers] contracted to audit the cash waterfall mechanism and the activities of the ECG, they refused to make their bank accounts available to the auditor. At that time, we [the NDC] thought that they were running around 37 accounts. Per the documents that have been presented by ECG itself to PURC, they are running 61 accounts,” he told Alfred Ocansey on The Key Points.
“That is a clear violation of the directives of the President; the directives that have been given to us by the IMF [International Monetary Fund] and the whole idea of the cash waterfall mechanism, so on the strength of that, what business does still have to be in the position,” he said.
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Although he noted that, per the PURC Act, 1997, the regulator cannot surcharge the individual board members, he emphasised that they should have been dissolved immediately.
“I can agree that [PURC] may not be able to surcharge them per the laws that we have today, but morally, they should be occupying that office,” Mr. Bawa reiterated.
Meanwhile, the regulator, the Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC), has fined the board of ECG an amount of GHS5.8 million due to the company’s failure to adhere to maintenance notices to customers, among other infractions.
The board of ECG, through their attorneys, has therefore rejected the GHC 5.8 million fine imposed on them.
According to the lawyers, the board members of the power distributor are not responsible for the day-to-day administration of the company and, therefore, are not principal officers to be held liable for a default on the part of ECG.