It's sorrowful defunct microfinance firms didn't have GH¢4 billion asset base – Eric Nipah

The Receiver of the 347 defunct microfinance companies, 23 savings and loans and finance houses, Eric Nana Nipah has said it was unfortunate they couldn’t retrieve the GH¢4 billion from the defunct microfinance firms as expected.

According to him, in as much as these firms claimed to have an asset base of about GH¢6 billion, the case was different after checks were conducted.

He stated that these defunct microfinance firms were rather in a sorrowful state.

“What I found was quite sorrowful; sorrowful in terms of the fact that although the balance sheets of these companies indicated that they had an asset base in excess of GH¢6 billion, actually, based on my assessment, I do not think they are up to even GH¢2 billion,” Eric Nana Nipah said on Citi TV‘s The Point of View, Wednesday.

He stated categorically that “A lot of these assets that were purported to be there were actually not there. When we did our examination, we also noted that quite a number of them had been diverted.”

Due to the diversion, the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) embarked on asset tracing and about 500 million have been recovered.

Mr Nipah was named as the Receiver after 347 microfinance companies had their license revoked by the Bank of Ghana as part of the financial sector clean-up on May 31, 2019.

The Bank of Ghana, on August 16, 2019, also revoked the licenses of 23 insolvent Savings and Loans companies and Finance Houses.

These actions were in line with Section 123 (1) of the Banks and Specialised Deposit-Taking Institutions Act, 2016 (Act 930), which requires the Bank of Ghana to revoke the license of a Bank or Specialised Deposit-Taking Institution (SDI) where the Bank of Ghana determines that the institution is insolvent.

About GH¢ 8.25 billion of depositors funds have been locked up and government, on the other hand, has settled 6.5 billion of this figure after validation.