The Nkawkaw High Court, presided over by Justice A.K. Amoakwa Boadu, has issued a bench warrant for the arrest of the Malaysian managing director (MD) of Ghana Telecom Company Ltd. (GT).
The M.D., Dato Abdul Malek Mohammed, is to be dragged by the warrant for failing to appear before the court on three occasions to answer charges of contempt against him and tow other senior officers of the company. The others are Nii Armah Fleischer Broke, the Eastern regional head, and James Brown Asiri, Nkawkaw area head of the GT.
The contempt was initiated by members of the Nkawkaw Communication Centres Association (NCCA) that initially filed a writ of interim injunction against GT at the same court to stop the company from further disconnection of telephone lines of the NCCA members and reconnect those already disconnected.
The court granted the application, on 15 March this year, and ordered GT to reconnect the telephone lines within 10 days, desist from further disconnection of NCCA members? lines until the substantice case was disposed of, but GT failed to comply with the court order.
The NCCA, therefore, filed the contempt charge against the three senior personnel but on all the occasions that the case was called for hearing, the MD failed to appear. So, counsel for the association, Baron Amoafo, applied for a bench warrant for his arrest.
Mr Amoafo argued that the MD had shown gross disrespect for the courts of the land for failing to answer the call for the high court on three solid occasions. He contended that under the Ghanaian Constitution, only sitting heads of state are immune from being prosecuted in court so the MD should have respected the Constitution and appear to contest the case against him.
The Eastern regional head told the court that Mohammed had been very busy attending a series of meeting at the ministries and the seat of Government in Accra, due to ongoing changes in Ghana Telecom, and that accounted for his failure to appear.
The high court, however, ruled that since the MD had failed on three different occasions to appear without any tangible reason, he had shown disrespect to it and, therefore, granted the bench warrant for his arrest. The case has been adjourned to 9 July this year.
It would be recalled that during an impasse between GT and the NCCA over telephone bills in which the association accused the GT of presenting bloated and faulty bills to its members, the company on its part accused the NCCA members of failing to pay their bills, running into several millions of cedis.
The matter was referred to an arbitrator, Mr William Boampong, who is a tribunal Chairman at Nkawkaw, for an amicable settlement. Since that did not work, and the company proceeded to disconnect their lines, the association went to court for the interim injunction, which was granted against GT on 15 March, this year. But GT failed to comply with the court orders.
