The ?1,950,000,000 bank deposit ...

Mr. Charles Bintim, the 44-year old Minister of local Government and Rural Development, deposited a whopping ?1,950,000,000.00 (?1.95 billion) in his personal bank account with the High Street Branch of Barclays Bank within a period of eight months.

The account was opened in July 2005 and the last amount was paid in two weeks ago in the following tranches; July 2005 - ? 1,000,000,000.00 September 2005 - ?450,000,000.00 October 2005 - ?50,000,000.00 21st March 2006 - ? 450,000,000.00 Total - ? 1,950,000,000.00 The last payment in was made in the company of the Minister?s police escort and his wife. Mr. Bintim is not known to be a rich man. He is not a businessman. Until his political appointments after the NPP came into power, he had been a teacher at a primary school, then a Primary school Head teacher, then the District Coordinator of the Non-Formal Education Division for the Saboba-Chereponi district.

In 2001, he was appointed the DCE for Saboba-Chereponi, then the Deputy Northern Regional Minister and then the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development in 2005.

Not even his entire income earned during his 44 years existence on earth will amount to one-third of the earth-shaking amount of nearly ?2 billion that he has paid into his account within the last 8 months.

"The Ghana Palaver" contacted a Bank Manager who was a member of the Citizens Vetting Committee (CVC) in the early days of the PNDC Government. He said: "These were the kinds of activities the CVC was interested in. The Committee had one major term of reference: "to investigate persons whose lifestyles and expenditures exceeded their known and declared incomes" This is still part of the functions of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). They must act quickly. They must find out from Mr. Bintim whether those monies belong to him and if they do, whether he has declared them (at least the 2005 payments) to the IRS and paid the appropriate taxes on then. The IRS will not interest itself in where he got the money from".

On the other had, an official of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), which was born out of the Office of the Coordinator, Revenue Commissioners and Investigations, which in turn was born out of the erstwhile CVC and National Investigations Committee (NIC) of the PNDC era, had this to say:

"We are very interested in how he got the money. If it is bribe money, if it is cocaine money, if it is money gotten out of corruption or extortion, we want to know. Ideally, my bosses should commence investigations into this matter but because of who he is, President Kufuor has to order them to do it before they do it".

Mr. Bintim himself has worsened matters by acts of extreme indiscretion. When he heard over last weekend that the story was about to break, he called a very senior journalist whose paper had the story and pleaded with him to kill the story. When the very senior journalist asked him where the money came from, he blurted out, and here we quote, "the money is for President Kufuor". What Mr. Bintim did not know was that at the time he uttered those words, the very senior journalist was in a meeting with a cross-section of people, not all of whom were exactly friends of the NPP, and he had put his mobile on speaker phone.