Two arrested over fake fertilizer coupons scandal in Upper East

Two persons have been remanded into police custody while other officials of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) are under investigation for their involvement in a fake fertilizer coupon scandal that has rocked four districts of the Upper East Region.

The suspects were arrested for using fake fertilizer coupons to secure some 12,000 subsidized fertilizers from government's planting for food and jobs program in the Pusiga, Garu, Talensi districts and Bawku Municipality.

The suspects, according to details, printed out the fake coupons with different serial numbers and “were using them to buy fertilizers".

Some of the diverted fertilizers are from fertilizer companies including Yara Ghana Ltd, Afcott Ghana limited, AGM limited, Chemico limited, Omni Ghana Fert Ltd, Iddisal Company limited and Marco Fertile limited.

Luck however run out of them when the fertilizer companies detected the abnormality during payment. The scanned coupons revealed they were fake.

“We realized that some people had printed fake coupons which have different serial numbers from the original coupons sent from Accra and they are using it to buy fertilizers. So, when the fertilizer companies sent the coupons for payments, they were scanned and they detected over 12, 000 fake fertilizer coupons". Upper East Regional Director of MOFA, Francis Ennor said in his address to Journalists.

Meanwhile, Francis Ennor has stressed on the commitment of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture (MOFA) to bring those culpable of the offense to face the full rigors of the Law. He said MOFA will do this with support from the region's security agencies.

“Our district officers’ names are there because they endorsed the coupons. The AEA who issued the coupons are there, but the signatures and stamps on the coupons are different.”

“Imagine Talensi, we don’t have Talensi-Nabdam district but the stamp at the back of the coupon is Talensi-Nabdam, and in Bawku too, they use Bawku East instead of Bawku municipal. And the Director at Pusiga used a black pen to sign all the coupons that he used,” he noted.