The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), has accused government of creating a corrupt scheme worth over GH¢ 448 million as payment to Zoomlion Ghana, for the management of some Youth Employment Modules.
According to the NPP, the payments are being made even although Zoomlion’s contract with the government has been canceled.
The Policy Advisor to the NPP’s 2016 campaign, Boakye Agyarko at a press conference on Wednesday, said the government’s initial payment of GH¢ 62 million to the company shows that the government has no intentions of fighting corruption as it claims.
He alleged that government has authorized the diversion of 10 per cent of allocations from the District Assembly Common Fund meant for the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) to make the payments to Zoomlion.
“And to make matters worse, Cabinet has given go-ahead for the use of the 10 per cent of the District Assembly Common Fund allocated to the Youth Employment Agency (YEA) to make this illegal payment…This amount is meant to pay for 45,000 workers who are actually on the payroll of the various District Assemblies. So, the Assemblies are responsible for paying the wages of the 45,000 and not the service provider,” he said.
“In effect, the public was told after the ministerial committee report on GYEEDA in 2013 that the contract had been terminated. However, this pre-election decision to pay off GH¢448m, demonstrates that the associated presidential directives were a lie. Why should Ghanaians be saddled with a debt to the tune of GH¢448m when both the government and Zoomlion admit that there was no contract to that effect? The NPP sees this clearly as just another creative means of resurrecting a scheme created in the mode of bogus judgment debts,” he added.
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By: Jonas Nyabor/citifmonline.com/Ghana