Investigate Exposé on ‘Missing’ Oil-Funded Projects – Energy Institute

The Institute of Energy Security (IES), is calling for further probes into reports that many oil-funded projects in the three regions of the north are non-existent.

The Institute wants those found complicit after the investigation prosecuted.

According to latest information from the Public Interest and Accountability Committee (PIAC), about 50% of earmarked projects supposed to have been funded with Ghana’s petroleum revenue do not either exist or were not properly executed.

Speaking to Citi News, Principal Research Analyst at the Institute of Energy Studies, Richmond Rockson, said those responsible for diverting the funds must not go unpunished.

“This is as a result of our institutions not being able to monitor such projects because these projects will normally go to Parliament, get approval, and when the expenditure is done you expect the Auditor General to be able to audit and bring a report. But we don’t have the systems working carefully, it has to take PIAC to go and follow up and check whether these projects are ongoing or not.”

“…So like I said, it must be investigated, these companies must be prosecuted and any official found to be culpable must be brought to book because we cannot continue having these issues and wasting the limited resources that we have in this manner,” he added.

Background

PIAC had told Citi Business News after its inspection of the beneficiary project areas that, the state lost about $1.2 billion dollars to the supposed non-existent oil-funded projects.

Chairman of PIAC, Dr. Steve Manteaw, in an interview, said his outfit had written to the Finance Ministry seeking clarifications on the matter while calling on the Auditor General to look into the findings.

“On these visits, we discovered, to our dismay, that about half of the projects were either non-existent or poorly executed,” Dr. Manteaw said.

As an example, he noted that “there was a particular case of the Duuri Dam where an amount of about GHc 58,000 was allocated for rehabilitation works. The allocation was done in 2014, but as at 2016 when we visited the project site, nothing had happened. The project was actually non-existent.”

“There is also the case of Nakore dam in the Wa central municipality. There was the Farikiya Islamic school in Tamale. Again, when we visited [these sites], the projects were nonexistent,” he added.