Fighting Graft: Privatise prosecution – A-G

Auditor-General Daniel Domelevo has advocated the privatisation of the criminal prosecution of corrupt cases.

According to him, if the prosecution of corrupt individuals is expanded to allow for private individuals to take such matters to court, instead of allowing only state prosecutors to do so, the fight against corruption will be greatly boosted.

Mr Domelevo made this known when the Special Budget Committee of Parliament paid a working visit to him at his office.

He said: “The request for power to prosecute, this was something which my predecessor actually started, he wrote to the Attorney General asking for the power to prosecute and when I came, I also sent a reminder but with you approving the office of the special prosecutor, I don’t think we should continue having so many prosecutors.

“When I was at the World Bank, the UN had a convention that we had to decentralise prosecution especially on corruption. So, we think the way to sustain the fight against corruption is to decentralise the prosecution of corruption issues and some of us took it a bit further by saying that: can’t we commercialise it instead of just decentralising it? So that instead of you deciding alone if we should prosecute that person, a group of lawyers and accountants can come together, investigate a case, take it to court and recover the money.

“They can actually earn their living on that, the US does that. They can live on fighting corruption, and that case, we don’t need any political or any leadership from one person to hold the whole country to ransom. So, if we can commercialise prosecution of corruption, we can find these new lawyers who have just finished school who don’t have any chamber, to come together with a group of accountants and engineers and people who can provide them with technical support, they will investigate serious cases like these, go to court themselves and if the law provides that 10 per cent of whatever they save is theirs, they’ll like to pursue it.

“They see GHS10billion or GHS20billion, they will go for it and I think it’s something the country should start thinking about, that is, commercialising the fight against corruption. Together with the office of the Special Prosecutor, we have decided to collaborate so that our audit is not just taken as a report and people ignore it with the impunity that it has been in the past.”