My GH¢100K locked up in ex-presidential candidate's bank – Rt. Rev. Bosomtwi-Ayensu

The recapitalisation exercise of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) was a good thing that saved the financial sector from collapsing, Rt. Rev. Stephen Richard Bosomtwi-Ayensu, the Superintendent Minister of the Methodist Church of Ghana has said, even though he revealed that the exercise led to the lock-up of his GH¢100,000 investment in a bank “belonging to a former presidential candidate”.

The Bank of Ghana gave all commercial banks in Ghana up to 31 December 2018 to recapitalised from GH¢120 million to GH¢400 million. Some banks merged to meet the new minimum capital requirement while others could not and, so, were either downgraded by the central bank or collapsed completely.

Rt. Rev. Bosomtwi-Ayensu said the erstwhile Mahama administration failed to ensure that the banking sector operated in a sanitised environment, thus, the failure of some of the local banks to operate within the regulatory framework of the Bank of Ghana.

Since August 2017, nine local banks have gone under. While some of them were accused of using suspicious means and capital to set up, others were also found to have been mismanaged by their shareholders.

Heritage Bank and Premium Bank were the last two to be folded up by the central bank. The previous seven included former Finance Minister Dr Kwabena Duffour’s uniBank, The Beige Bank, Sovereign Bank, The Construction Bank, The Royal Bank, Mr Prince Kofi Amoabeng’s UT Bank, and Capital Bank, which was chaired by Pastor Mensa Otabil.

While UT Bank and Capital Bank were swallowed by the state-owned GCB Bank with the blessing of the Dr Ernest Addison-led central bank, the seven others were subsumed by the all-new state-owned bank Consolidated Bank Ghana Limited (CBG), which was created by the Bank of Ghana during its “clean-up” exercise of the sector.

Speaking on the Ghana Yensom show on Accra100.5FM hosted by Kwabena Prah Jnr (The Don) on Friday, 28 June 2019, Rt. Rev. Bosomtwi-Ayensu said: “For those of us who appreciate matters relating to economics and finance if we don’t support the government in the recapitalisation then we will be doing a disservice to the nation”.

“I am also a victim of the banks that collapsed. I have my money locked up in a bank belonging to a former presidential candidate in Ghana; that bank says it doesn’t have money to give to me”, he complained.

“More than GH¢100,000 of my investment has been locked up in his bank, I was about retiring, so, I decided to save my little income only for it to be locked up in that bank. The owner of that bank is a serious politician in Ghana, a former presidential candidate who wanted to be a president in Ghana”, Rt. Rev. Bosomtwi-Ayensu hinted without mentioning names.

The cleric added: “I always applaud this government because of this move to clean up the banking sector. All the banks that were not performing deserved to be collapsed.