Govt's Domestic Debt Exchange programme is a 'weapon of mass destruction' – Martin Kpebu

The lawyer for a collective of individual bondholders, Martin Kpebu, has said that his clients remain opposed to the plan of government to include them in its debt exchange programme.

According to a report by myjoyonline.com, the lawyer likened the government’s Domestic Debt Exchange programme to a nuclear weapon which will kill many individual bondholders if they are included.

“We’re still standing by the ‘no-no-no-no’. So, we’re asking government to respectfully exempt individual bondholders from this programme.

“As I’ve stated over and over, the programme, that’s the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP) is proven to be a weapon of mass destruction.

“It (the DDEP) is going to kill more citizens, it’s going to destroy more businesses. It’s going to destroy more schools and livelihoods and so on and so forth,” Kpebu is quoted to have said on Joy FM’s Newsnight programme.

Meanwhile, the Minister for Finance, Ken Ofori-Atta, has stated that the debt exchange programme is necessary to fixing Ghana’s ailing economy.

According to him, scrapping the programme is not an option.

“We have a situation where our debt exchange is necessary… we have a situation where we have come out of certain formulations ... I think we’ve done that successfully.”

“In the same way, we sat with the union pensions, and I think we are making great progress in what we do for them. In the same way in which we are looking at individual bondholders to see how we can tweak this. Would we lose a bit of what we have? I think all of us are going to. But we have to make sure that what we eventually come up with will create sustainability,” he explained.



IB/SARA