Editorial: Valco Sale Fiasco?

Parliament early last week ratified the purchase and sale agreement between the government of Ghana, Norsk Hydro (NHY.OL) and Companhia Vale do Rio to offload 70% shares in the Volta Aluminium Company (VALCO) at a cost of $175 million.

Barely some few days after the ratification of this agreement, the foreign buyers have come out to deny that they have entered into such agreement with the government.

"We have not signed any agreement. This is something we have looked at just like other places in the world," an official of the consortium told the Reuters News Agency.

The Chronicle finds the claim being made by a member of the consortium as a dent on the image of this country. We are, however, happy that the Minister for Trade and Industry, Papa Owusu Ankomah has come out to debunk the claim insisting that the agreement still holds.

In an interview he granted us yesterday, the Sekondi MP said the negative reports about the deal are not helping the country and called on the media to put a stop to it.

The Chronicle does not believe that the Ghanaian media would deliberately destroy a deal that would be beneficial to the entire country. What the media has sought to do is to inform the public about the development so that whoever is at fault would sit up and do the right thing. The Chronicle believes that something might have gone wrong somewhere, which is why the consortium came out to denounce the deal.

Government must therefore be careful with its dealings in order not to jeopardise the agreement, provided it exists as the Minister is claiming. If upon all these explanations by the Minister, it turned out at the end of the day that the consortium had indeed not entered into any agreement with the government, it would then mean that parliament did not do due diligence, and we would hold the legislature responsible for the bad deal.

For now we are respecting what Papa Owusu Ankomah has said and hope he has given the true picture of the situation to the public.