With GH¢20 billion, collapsing banks by NPP government was needless - Adongo

Member of Parliament for Bolgatanga Central, Isaac Adongo has argued that the GH¢20 billion used in the financial sector cleanup that resulted in the collapse of banks and many other financial institutions could have been channelled to save the collapsed banks instead so as to have avoided job losses while maintaining confidence in the banking system and financial sector as a whole.

Speaking Wednesday on The Point of View show on CitiTV, Mr Adongo, who is also a member of Parliament’s Finance Committee, reiterated his point that the money used to ‘collapse’ the financial institutions should have been put into a fund and disbursed accordingly to save the struggling institutions.

“All that you needed to do was to set up a fund of 20 billion. Encourage the financial institutions that are struggling to recapitalize to approach you with a proposal. You can go behind the scenes even without Ghanaians knowing – and often these type of things are not done in the full glare of the media- and do a valuation of those institutions and agree to a shareholding structure that allows you put money there, run the banks with them, and when they become very good banks, you give the banks back to them and exit.

And you would have kept those jobs; you would have kept the confidence of the financial sector intact; you would have made sure livelihoods are still maintained…,” he explained.

Mr Adongo has been a fierce critic of the approach adopted by the Bank of Ghana and the Securities and Exchange Commission in cleaning up the financial sector.

The financial sector cleanup which began in 2017 and ended this year saw the revocation of 9 banks, 15 savings and loans companies.