We read with great shock the Daily Post’s publication on Wednesday 18th August, 2010 under the headline New Vodafone Boss Cracks Anti-Corruption Whip. Vodafone Ghana respects the editorial rights and competencies of the Daily Post newspaper, but this story is untrue; nor were we contacted to confirm or deny it.
The fact that Vodafone Group and Vodafone Ghana will not and do not tolerate corruption in any form is accurate. However, the story which stated that CEO of Vodafone Ghana, Kyle Whitehill, had ordered the Chief Technical Officer, Tony Dolton, and the Head of Fibre, Dell Jeffrey to leave the shores of Ghana in 24 hours due to what the paper calls corrupt practices is completely untrue. The publication also sought to imply that the management of Vodafone Ghana under its former CEO, David Venn, spirited huge sums of money out of the country; and Kyle Whitehill, the new CEO is in Ghana to weed out the leadership team who worked with David Venn. This again is completely false.
We are indeed disappointed in the fact that the Daily Post did not seek to talk to Vodafone to verify the facts and went ahead to publish this falsehood. If it had, it would have found out that Tony Dolton, the Chief Technical Officer, is at post as the leader of the technology department. The Head of Fibre, Dell Jeffrey, was in Ghana on contract as part of the business transformation team, but has moved on after his contract ended.
The Vodafone Group and all its operational companies, across the world, take matters of corruption and transparency very seriously and would not tolerate anything in the semblance of corruption or lack of transparency. The other issue raised by the paper that the David Venn-led management increased the salaries of its senior management team by 500% is very alarming because nothing of that nature has ever happened in the company. Salary increases for our employees are not arbitrary and unilateral. They are based on performance and other human resource related factors.
As we stated earlier, we have a lot of respect for the editorial team of the Daily Post, but we would advise that, as the ethics of journalism demand, Vodafone should be contacted for our views or clarifications before such publications.
Ike Cudjoe
Head, Corporate Communications
