The Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) has denied clearing former Sanitation Minister Cecilia Dapaah before transferring her case to the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO).
The AG’s Office advised EOCO to stop investigating the former minister on grounds that the file did not have an investigative report and further documentation to support a money laundering prosecution.
According to the AG, the police are also investigating the source of funding by Madam Cecilia Dapaah, so there was no need for EOCO to continue with the case.
The AG’s advice came after EOCO sent OSP’s transferee docket to the Attorney General’s office for advice on whether it should conduct investigations or not.
The Attorney General’s office further accused the OSP of failing to provide EOCO with sufficient information regarding its collaboration with the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to aid further investigations.
But the Director for Strategy, Research, and Communications at the OSP, Mr. Samuel Appiah Darko, has refuted the reports that the OSP cleared Madam Dapaah.
Speaking in an interview with Joy News, he said the OSP closed the case since the evidence they had was largely in the province of money laundering.
According to him, Madam Dapaah could not reasonably explain all the seized money from her home, as all answers were untrue after investigations.
He said EOCO did not request the FBI investigation report, although there were joint representatives from the two agencies working on the file transfer.
“We want to make it very clear that EOCO did not request for the FBI report. Even if they did, the FBI report has a lot of confidentiality clauses that were directed particularly to the OSP and you can’t just give it to another agency because you have transferred the case. There ought to be a lot of inter-agency collaboration and clearance. So if it had happened, we may have triggered the clearance clauses so that either we are cleared by FBI or FBI sends the report directly to EOCO.”
He added that the OSP referred the case to EOCO, with all relevant documentation including caution statements of over 20 suspects in America, Accra and Kumasi and other information including relatives of Madam Dapaah claiming the monies and some jewellery in her house were family heirlooms to assist EOCO in conducting its own independent investigation into the financial transactions involved.
“The OSP should be considered as a whistleblower to EOCO. So as a whistle-blower, we gave EOCO platinum information. Ordinarily, you will not even find other agencies giving such information to EOCO,” Mr. Darko noted in the interview.
“Our referral is not just in respect of a transaction in America. Also, we were not conducting money laundering investigation, we were conducting corruption investigation. We are of the opinion that, we had all it takes to send that referral to EOCO because there was no way we could have proceeded and then investigated and write a report on money laundering and send it to EOCO for onward transfer to the Attorney General. We only referred a matter to EOCO as whistle-blowers for EOCO to investigate…We cannot instruct EOCO on what they should do,” he added.
By: Rainbowradioonline.com/Ghana
