Plot To Deny GIA Cocaine Deal Exposed

I have read on your website, an alleged response from Mr. Len Hobbs regarding our article of yesterday under the caption "ENQUIRER PUT OUT FALSE INFORMATION". The source of the rejoinder as published on www.gahanaweb.com was attributed The Enquirer.

First of all, I wish to state that we are not the source of that purported response. Again, I will like to make it clear, that since yesterday when the story broke, certain individuals within the current management of GIA have been maneuvering to get Mr. Hobbs to deny the story by lying to him that the company is to be sold and that he could buy it.

Mr. Hobbs because of his interest in buying GIA is being pressured to deny things he personally observed and documented whilst working as maintenance engineer at GIA.

It is a matter of fact that by mid-day yesterday, there was a telephone conversation between Mr. Hobbs and a senior management of GIA where our story was grossly misrepresented to him and subsequently prevailed upon to deny the story through Joy FM.

By 5pm yesterday, I received a call from a reporter saying that he had spoken to Mr. Hobbs who had denied our story. I told the Joy FM reporter that I have the document written by Mr. Hobbs in which the said allusions about the previous management covering up for drugs trafficking by failing to report it in spite was covered up.

The joy FM Reporter claimed that Mr. Hobbs admitted authoring "thousands of documents on GIA" and wanted to know from he the Joy FM reporter how The Enquirer managed to "obtain the document". The joy FM reporter told me himself that "I told him that as a journalist am not interested in that"

I then asked the Joy Fm reporter to ask Mr. Hobbs to produce the document he authored about GIA, but the Joy FM reporter said Hobbs told him that he had written thousands of documents and did not know which one I was referring to except that "he did not grant an interview to the Enquirer". The Enquirer never stated in its story that Mr. Hobbs granted an interview with us. We stated that the revelations were contained in a document authored by him.

The Joy Fm reporter then asked The Enquirer to give him a copy of our document. The Enquirer told Joy FM that since we were serializing the document and since it appears he was bent on doing that story, we would keep our copy. Joy FM failed to get to the bottom of the story and went a ahead to carry a story which suggested that Hobbs denied ever making such a statement.

The Joy FM reporter then questioned whether the headline "Drug Ring Operating within GIA" was a fair headline to the current management. From then it became clear to me that in his haste to carry the story he had not bothered to even read the original story in The Enquirer. If he had done so, he would have realized that the headline in The Enquirer was different from the one on Ghanaweb.com.

The same Joy FM reporter in interviewing Hobbs related The Enquirer story to the current management which elicited comments like "The story reads like this 'revelation' just occurred" from Mr. Hobbs. Indeed we never made any such allusion that the drug trafficking occurred under the current management. The story was reported in the passive voice.

Mr. Hobbs admitted in his rejoinder that "I did criticize the 'initial' management group of Presbury, Vitale and the Crabbe brothers as being inept, corrupt and professionally unqualified for the positions they held. The evidence, and qualifying events, have been recorded publicly that those comments are true"

In fact, the above quotation is almost a verbatim of his comments on the GIA management as contained on page 2 of his four page treatise on GIA.

Let me state that it was during one of such write ups in January 2009, precisely on January 6, 2009, that Mr. Hobbs made the revelation about the smuggling of drugs and precious metal within the airline. By the time we finish serializing his four page report on the inside story of GIA, it will be clear to all discerning readers why there is pressure to deny the inside story of GIA . We stand by our story.