ECG’s GH¢540m Indebtedness Affecting GRIDco Operations

The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDco), Jonathan Amoako-Baah, says the Company would soon dispatch its staff to the premises of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to demand payment of debt.

He said the high indebtedness of ECG and Volta Aluminium Company (VALCo) was affecting the operations of GRIDco.

Amoako-Baah the two major customers of the Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDco), namely the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) and the Volta Aluminium Company (VALCo), owed the Company GH¢540,396,706.37 and GH¢30,728,205.78 respectively.

Speaking at the Company’s Eight Annual General Meeting in Accra, on last Friday said “The strategy we are adopting now is that, we’ll ask our people to go to ECG every day to see the Managing Director and the Director of Finance, and drum it home to them that we need this money to finance our projects”.

He said GRIDco could not carry out a lot of activities due to the indebtedness of those companies, stating “We have suppliers, vendors and compensation to pay, but because we don’t have money it has stalled our projects”.

Mr. Amoako-Baah however, ruled out cutting supply of electric power to ECG or going to court with the matter, saying; “We are all government companies and they’re our brothers so we’ll not fight this legally. I believe that through negotiations we should be able to take our monies from them”.

“The defaulting companies were not fulfilling their indebtedness regularly as agreed, therefore, the debts piled up and the ECG were paying eight million Ghana cedis a week so we asked them to up the payment to 12 million a week,” he said.

He suggested to the Management of ECG to use proceeds from the Energy Bond to defray the debts.

“We would have been glad if government gives money from the Energy Bond directly to us, instead of giving it to the ECG before paying us”, Amoako-Baah said.

The Energy Bond that was issued this year raked in GH¢4.7 billion, which would help ECG and other defaulting companines to pay off their debts.

Source: thePublisher