Presidency must respond to GHC500,000 bribery claims - Lawyer

A private legal practitioner, Yaw Oppong, has urged the presidency to officially respond to the bribery allegations leveled against President John Mahama by the New Patriotic Party (NPP).

According to him, it will be foolhardy for the presidency to simply dismiss the allegations as irrelevant because “these are serious claims against the president of the country.”

Mustapha Hamid, the spokesperson of the Presidential candidate of the NPP Nana Akufo-Addo on Tuesday, November 29 accused Mahama and his brother Ibrahim of inducing Mr. Bugri Naabu with two SUVs, GHS3.3 million, GHS500,000 in October this year.

The said goodies, according to him, were meant to cajole the NPP’s Northern regional chairman to ditch the party and launch scathing tribalistic assault on Akufo-Addo, labeling him as intolerant to people from the Northern extraction.

“It’s terribly sad. This country is in serious trouble, we need to rescue this country from serious trouble. The presidency has been so depraved, so muddied, so dirty that I tell you in all sincerity as a Ghanaian that I feel terribly sad as a Ghanaian,” said Mr. Hamidu.

The National Organiser of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), Kofi Adams rubbished the allegations as “political gimmick.”

That notwithstanding, Mr. Oppong believes the presidency must officially respond to the allegations because they are damning.

“It is a rebuttable presumption; action must be taken against the claims or they could be assumed to be true,” he stated in an interview with Citi FM on Wednesday.

He also urged the police to independently investigate the claims by the NPP to establish their veracity.

The police, he said does not need a “complaint from a named person before they start an investigation.”

He nonetheless averred that it is up to the police and other responsible institutions to determine whether the claims are worth pursuing as they could “invite the person who made the claims and who they were made against for questioning.”