Ghanaian Chronicle August 10, 2000
By Dominic Jale
Accra - Two employees of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and an Accra-based businessman, have been busted by security agents in an attempt to export a quantity of blank Ghanaian passports abroad.
The three, Chronicle learnt, were the main syndicate behind the forgery of Ghanaian passports, which has become a worrisome issue in the country for some years now.
Chronicle has gathered that about a fortnight ago, one member of the syndicate and a businessman, a certain Kojo Nunoo, were arrested at the Kotoka International Airport (KIA) in an attempt to export a quantity of Ghanaian passports abroad.
Nunoo, who is a known passport agent at the Tip Toe Gardens, near the Kwame Nkrumah Circle, during interrogations by security agents, mentioned a Mr. Dickson Kofi Asare, driver of the Director of Passports, as his customer who supplied him the blank passport booklets to be sent to Europe for sale.
According to Chronicle sources, when Asare was arrested, he also made mention of a Mr. Timothy Dongotey, a clerk at the issuing desk of the passport office, as another member of the syndicate.
Chronicle learnt that Dongotey and Asare, for some time now, have been stealing booklets of blank passports and later forged the particulars at the Tip Toe Gardens, with the help of Nunoo.
Suspicion is that, the syndicate is the brain behind the growing fake passports circulating in the system, which easily find way into some neighbouring countries.
Following the arrest of the three, Chronicle learnt that, work at the Passport Office has come to a standstill, for the last two weeks.
This, the Chronicle gathered, has paved way for the internal auditors to audit and take stock in order to trace the quantities and numbers of the booklets that the syndicate had made away with in their deals.
Meanwhile, the three members of the syndicate have been arraigned before a Regional Tribunal and the Osu Community Tribunal and granted a ?10 million bail each with two sureties to be justified, while investigations are still going on.
