I feel so sad to watch the desperate, erratic, irrational, posture of the Minority members. Don't they have any rational elder to advice them that they are making mockery of themselves?
I feel so sad to watch the desperate, erratic, irrational, posture of the Minority members. Don't they have any rational elder to advice them that they are making mockery of themselves?
Kaas 7 years ago
Speak to the issues, the guy has jabed the finance minister
Speak to the issues, the guy has jabed the finance minister
Stormborn 7 years ago
BUSINESS U Should Do Right Away!
Small business you say?.NGN 30k(about $100 min) average daily is possible &more! U do the sum for what is being averaged per month! Most people, even graduates ignore daily income services se ... read full comment
BUSINESS U Should Do Right Away!
Small business you say?.NGN 30k(about $100 min) average daily is possible &more! U do the sum for what is being averaged per month! Most people, even graduates ignore daily income services sector. All they see is the dirt, presumed indignity on those who do them. An empty pocket from no job or an underpaid job is far more indignifying. Educated? Start small but grow, package it well, employ others, while U supervise.This is guaranteed with depth of skills & acumen in smartphones & Tablets Repairs business.. Visit a good Phones & Tablets Repair centre & open your eyes. You will see what I mean! Get " Mobile Phones & Tablets Repairs : A Complete Guide for Beginners & Professionals " 2day! Visit Amazon, Barnes & Noble, eBay etc
Odikro 7 years ago
Ghana government and/or the NDC in a cage, should inquire into whoever transported the $3 million to the Black Stars in Brazil and how much he/she was paid. The crooked John Mahama paid his brother $1.5 million to transport $ ... read full comment
Ghana government and/or the NDC in a cage, should inquire into whoever transported the $3 million to the Black Stars in Brazil and how much he/she was paid. The crooked John Mahama paid his brother $1.5 million to transport $3 million to Brazil. You got it. No April fool. Ibrahim Mahama made a kool $1.5 million while teachers had no chalk in the classroom.
Osman Sagnarigu 7 years ago
The transaction is not an arm-length deal. There is apparent conflict of interest, which is not what NPP promised Ghanaians. Why wasn't it an open market deal? Why restricted to sole source, and with an investor closer to the ... read full comment
The transaction is not an arm-length deal. There is apparent conflict of interest, which is not what NPP promised Ghanaians. Why wasn't it an open market deal? Why restricted to sole source, and with an investor closer to the Finance Minister? Fishy deals???
PRINCE KWASI ADADE (OFIE P33) 7 years ago
AUTHOR: STEPHEN DONKOR -------- Hei, NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONCERT(NDC) should be ready to stay in opposition for eternity. Considering the prudent economic foundation the NPP has started to put in place by reducing taxes, tack ... read full comment
AUTHOR: STEPHEN DONKOR -------- Hei, NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONCERT(NDC) should be ready to stay in opposition for eternity. Considering the prudent economic foundation the NPP has started to put in place by reducing taxes, tackling the Banks policy rates and the lmplementation of the One District One Factory policy to curb the menace of employment in Ghana. The free High School program the National Health Insurance Scheme and many more programs to ease the suffering and hardship that the criminal Mahama administration unleashed on Ghanaians. Do you think we Ghanaians would be fooled again to throw our bones back to you dogs? Solve the puzzle NDC goons.
Kaas 7 years ago
The coupon rate is too high so government should invest it wisely. The rate is above commercial lending rate by the banks in Ghana. I teams that the banks dollar lending rate is cheaper than the coupon rate
The coupon rate is too high so government should invest it wisely. The rate is above commercial lending rate by the banks in Ghana. I teams that the banks dollar lending rate is cheaper than the coupon rate
Kaas 7 years ago
* It means that the banks dollar lending rate in ghana is cheaper than the bond
* It means that the banks dollar lending rate in ghana is cheaper than the bond
Kay 7 years ago
Do the banks in Ghana have that much to lend ?
Already the government under Mahama owed them so much.
If it were possible don't you think it would have been done that way?
Do the banks in Ghana have that much to lend ?
Already the government under Mahama owed them so much.
If it were possible don't you think it would have been done that way?
Shaftesbury 7 years ago
The NDC members of parliament are so disorganised that they sound more like an empty barrel make comments just about everything and seem to forget just under a year ago they the same NDC made same or worse from the bus brandi ... read full comment
The NDC members of parliament are so disorganised that they sound more like an empty barrel make comments just about everything and seem to forget just under a year ago they the same NDC made same or worse from the bus branding to the stop on all government departments employment and still saw it as the norm
Kwame s 7 years ago
Hilarious now the free money has stopped for Ndc costing Ghana billions in corruption they are picking at anything ...whatvassholes justvwsot PPAs Cxl or "delayed" as they are just corrupt and cost Ghana tooo much now hopeful ... read full comment
Hilarious now the free money has stopped for Ndc costing Ghana billions in corruption they are picking at anything ...whatvassholes justvwsot PPAs Cxl or "delayed" as they are just corrupt and cost Ghana tooo much now hopefully AMERI deal is blown out of existence also AMERI What a surprise ...after bribing everyone to go on a visit to review the contract ....one minute going to negotiate now no negotiate ........they set the company up to SCREW Ghana the world is laughing at Ghana ...how many other multi million dollar contracts have AMERI ACHIEVED...ZERO how many other contracts has that crook His Royal Highness Sheikh Ahmed Bin Dalmook Al Maktoum, received a deal of $150 million commission ZERO ... why did the witness a known crook UMAR FAROOQ ZAHOOR witness contract then they say no no no he is not the crook he is s different man then a few days later he is removed ftom web site and resigned for personal reasons . Full story on Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang (VG so corrupt bribery greedy NDC just screwed Ghana so CONTRACT is a FRAUD GET them all arrested for loss to state ...if nothing happens then NPP HAS ACCEPTED A BRIBE TO shut up? Now they have paid the committee hotels expenses and flights to investigate ....conflict of interest!!! (More bribes) apart from all the goings on the executive I trimmer from that EVIL corrupt ex president mahatma (agreeing to a project costing $300million more than any other project in the world EVER) the contract reads if AMERI do not like the government or whatever they can MAKE the government BUY the project ....so that's $300 million more than ANY other similar projects in the world ...TOTAL CORRUPTION TOTAL DISGRACE..100% within a few years they will attempt that clause as the project does not work $900million at one minute 12 cents then 14.5 cents per pkh for power (400mw at $600million oh dear Ghana ....EVERY ONE INVOLVED IN BRIBE-corruption PAST AND PRESENT WATCH THEM TALK RUBBISH TO CLOSE THE CONVERSATION DOWN
(Ofori Atta wildly removes 50,000 ghost names from Ghana's public payroll and it is good news)(still no arrests still no return of money even if $500 a month over 8 Years with NDC (they admitted in 2016 that they removed 27,000 ) so thats $462 million paid out and stolen by whoever withdrew the funds from those ghost accounts .
And not one mother fucker arrested or or 1 Cecilia recovered ...fucks sake ?!!!!
Source imani-
Friends, do not take the silence of AMERI’s supporters on this platform and in the open media to mean aloofness or nonchalance.
They have been hard at work, especially on WhatsApp and in private briefings, doing all they can to discredit IMANI’s campaign to persuade the public to view the deal as the “greatest swindle of the Ghanaian state in at least two decades”.
Since our responses have been fragmented across different posts, discussion threads, and ripostes across multiple platforms, we have been advised to assemble them all in one place in order to vindicate our campaign. We now have the pleasure and duty to proceed to do so.
Let us take just the main arguments that are being canvassed by pro-AMERI activists.
They have said that IMANI’s analysis of the financial terms of the deal is shallow because it assumes that such a deal can only be assessed in one way, when in fact different methods can show that it is a very fair deal.
IMANI is underestimating the cost of installing the turbines and exaggerating the profits made by the middle-men (brokers) because it does not understand IRR, NPV, and Discount Rate analysis, they insist.
How do we plead to this charge? Firstly, no one, at least, disputes the cost of the TM2500+ mobile aeroderivative gas turbines that were bought (in actual fact, the TM2500+ is the composite ‘power plant in the box’; the turbine itself in that box is the LM2500 aeroderivative engine).
And that is because no one can. Right there in Annex A to the agreement, its supplier and specifications are fully provided. The machine was acquired from APR, a recommended supplier of GE, by the brokers. APR openly lists the price of these machines. There is thus no dispute that the machines together cost $220 Million, and most likely less if bought in bulk.
As to why Ghana had to go to AMERI for AMERI to go to METKA for METKA to go to APR in order to acquire GE equipment, let’s leave that aside for now. Anybody with the most basic training knows that if something costs $22 million each and you want to acquire ten of them you would normally be entitled to a discount.
You can prove the point by walking to Kingdom Stationery and ordering 10 workstations at a go. I assure you a 15% discount off the catalogue price would be yours, but let’s even assume that the original procurers were obtuse enough to pay $220 million.
(Indeed in the World Energy Outlook database, per MW capital cost for gas turbine power is $500,000, so the $900,000 implied by the catalog price is precisely what you expect to see at catalogue price level, but let’s not over-flog the point.)
The $220 million is the engineering cost. Everyone knows that even if a machine, such as this one, has been designed as turnkey (literally, buy today, turn the key, and voila it starts working) one still need specialists to install, test and then commission it.
One also needs to plug it into whatever network is supposed to receive the output the machine generates. Also if somebody buys something on your behalf they deserve to be paid what in Ghana is called T&T.
Note however that in this case, unlike the case in a normal power plant, all that was needed was to integrate the turbines with the national grid equipment.
In fact, GE offers to install the machines for you in eleven days or even three days if as a user you don’t need a test run! You don’t have to have more than a JHS education to understand that what we are talking about here is not the building of Akosombo dam and township.
It is literally assembling a bunch of gizmos for cooling, firing up, and transmission of the generated power into the national grid.
As far as the transformers, civil works, utilities and sewers/tubing/tunnelling are concerned, Government of Ghana was responsible for bearing that cost. Supposing you bought a generator plant for installing in your factory for $22,000.
How much will you pay to install it? In Ghana’s case, continuing this analogy, we paid $14,000 because somehow we felt that even that part of the project should be handled by someone else and be billed as additional. But that is not even the main quarrel here.
Many anti-AMERI activists are not even taking the deal makers to task for paying $140 million on top of the $220 million to install a plant that from our analysis of several deals involving a EPC contractor cost of procurement, installation and commissioning almost never cross 10% of the total cost.
We are tearing our hair out because the government then went ahead and paid AN ADDITIONAL $150 million on top of things, citing something called ‘NPV analysis’ and ‘Balance of Plant’.
Yet, all one has to do is take a look at Annex E of the agreement and it is clear that the main core of this ‘balance’ that needs to be added to the turbines for the system to be complete and operational comprises merely of the exhaust module, the air intake nozzles and the data logging platform in the control room, all of these being assembly units clearly stated as standard and pre-packaged with the turbines!
All that is required, external to the weatherproof package and its trailer mounts, and in lieu of a complex structure, is the piping for coolant and fuel filtration and transmission.
So the “balance of plant” essentially refers to the fuel and coolant (‘demineralised water’) storage and dispensing system/controls that can be acquired for a few hundreds of thousands of dollars; and the earthing and electrical cabling works.
We are not talking here about giant buildings; or treatment systems; fire control was provided; ventilation is integrated, as is instrumentation; and security and fuel logistics handling is minimal because the plant is housed at the existing Takoradi Thermal Power station and shares its facilities.
And at any rate, the government of Ghana was billed separately for civil works, drainage and sewerage etc! So what serious ‘balance of plant’ are we talking about here exactly?
For a project that the manufacturer of the system says can take between 3 and eleven days from start to finish, we decided that for the work done in acquiring the plants and installing them (EPC), we will pay the brokers 65% of the total equipment cost due to our unwillingness to procure our own financing and then hire any EPC contractor for a few hundreds of thousands of dollars to commission the plants.
Anti-AMERI activists are willing to accept this $140 million dollar charge as pure financing costs (since the engineering, procurement, construction and commissioning activities in this project are hardly of serious note).
And had we left things there, the NPV analysis using an 8% discounting rate would have netted a decent aggregate profit of $72 million cool profit for the dealmakers, showing a 32% return in 5 years. Indeed, readers are welcome to take a look at how reasonable this rate of return is in a period of serious constraint in the energy plant financing industry. It is important to bear in mind when reviewing these calculations that cashflow from the investment is assured on a monthly basis; a graduated interest rate structure is required to fully appreciate the fixed cashflow; AMERI sought and secured exemptions from ALL domestic taxes in relation to the project; we are in a period of unprecedented low global interest rates; and there is a standby letter of credit to cover any defaults under every conceivable scenario in the one-sided agreement that was foisted on the Government of Ghana. AMERI enjoyed all of this PLUS a Performance Bond too (yes).
In fact, under the agreement, AMERI gets paid whether or not fuel from the government to produce electricity is forthcoming, and regardless of faults in the national grid.
It is easy to see how generous the deal at this level would have been when one benchmark against reference data globally.
The discount rate in Turkey itself is 5.25%. But the Ghanaian dealmakers felt that such prudence would not earn them any applause for being spectacular. So they upped the ante, and agreed to an additional $150 million on top of this for AMERI.
The party that did not procure the equipment, install a pipe, or turn even a valve on, but rode on the back of METKA and APR to secure the equipment and on PPL and Engineers & Planners to install and turn it on, gets a cool $122 million in NPV terms just for having swag! Frankly, that is where NPV analysis leads us.
And it sure as night follows day exonerates no one. In fact if we use as the discounting rate the cost of borrowing in the local USD credit market and compute the NPV of the margin for AMERI on the deal (relying on our generous EPC project value of $250 million), we get exactly $150 million! That is precisely the amount we overpaid if we measure against the alternative of borrowing from a consortium of local banks to buy the plant outright and getting the authorised supplier, APR, to install and commission. Any which way pro-AMERI analysts dice this, a $150 million loss cannot be argued away. For further clarity, see below a table providing comparative lending rates for various projects in the energy sector. But pro-AMERI analysts seem to believe that they have one ace up their sleeves. In some of the briefings, we have seen the argument appears to be that AMERI is producing cheap power and that cannot be the case if the capital cost of the plant is bloated (though as you can see from the other table attached, the capital cost is indeed the highest in Ghana). Fair point: how can an exorbitantly priced machine produce cheap trinkets? When some of us first heard this argument, frankly, we thought it was a joke. On top of selling the machines to Ghana at an exorbitant price and compelling us to provide fuel to power it, AMERI then went ahead and inserted a cool 0.5 US cents per kilowatt hour charge for the power that we shall be producing from equipment that we are paying for using fuel that we are supplying, netting them a neat $16.6 million a year! And though the agreement says that the plant gets handed over to the Government of Ghana if we keep up with all our payments, they still managed lock the power tariffs in the post-transfer period in an obvious ploy to ensure that even after handing the plant over to us they can still run the show (hence the efforts to get another plant at the Takoradi Power Station handed over to them). The combined tariff of 62 pesewas per kilowatt-hour that AMERI itself discloses in the agreement may be compared with the 2016 August Bulk Generation Charge that PURC has allowed other power plants in Ghana to charge on average: 35.97 pesewas! AMERI is thus, in fact, nearly 75% more expensive than the average power plant in Ghana. And we haven’t even factored in the cost of fuel. Consider that without a revision of the agreement, AMERI will be operating what is, in essence, a separate price-gouging regime in the country, in defiance of the PURC, that shall see Ghanaians paying almost twice for its power if we don’t act soon to shave off some of the $102 million a year it has managed to squeeze out of our diffident State. In view of all the foregoing analysis, IMANI’s simple view is that the Government of Ghana should not relent until it has managed to shave off two million dollars from each monthly payment. Duty calls on every Ghanaian to join this campaign
Kwame s 7 years ago
But in saying that yes an investigation is correct
But in saying that yes an investigation is correct
Kay 7 years ago
Another avenue to make money. What investigation and who will be members?
Another avenue to make money. What investigation and who will be members?
Kk 7 years ago
NPP cannot investigate NPP. What will expect from that investigation ? Cover up, lies and denials and in the end no wrong doing will be establish after a long delay of the case. Bond was sold in two days but invebsigatiom can ... read full comment
NPP cannot investigate NPP. What will expect from that investigation ? Cover up, lies and denials and in the end no wrong doing will be establish after a long delay of the case. Bond was sold in two days but invebsigatiom can be spread over two or three years and what will be the outcome. NDC should file a case in the US for a credible and non partisan investigation. NDC needs to permission from NPP to file such a case. Go ahead and file the case swiftly now.
THE CRUSADER 7 years ago
Harruna,sit well and start from dubious teper useless bounds,sada nada miss nonsenses fake judgement concorted debts ameri demonic deal ,just to say the least.THAT VICE PRESIDENTS HOUSE,talk of it.useless investment.
Harruna,sit well and start from dubious teper useless bounds,sada nada miss nonsenses fake judgement concorted debts ameri demonic deal ,just to say the least.THAT VICE PRESIDENTS HOUSE,talk of it.useless investment.
BERNARD 7 years ago
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I feel so sad to watch the desperate, erratic, irrational, posture of the Minority members. Don't they have any rational elder to advice them that they are making mockery of themselves?
Speak to the issues, the guy has jabed the finance minister
BUSINESS U Should Do Right Away!
Small business you say?.NGN 30k(about $100 min) average daily is possible &more! U do the sum for what is being averaged per month! Most people, even graduates ignore daily income services se ...
read full comment
Ghana government and/or the NDC in a cage, should inquire into whoever transported the $3 million to the Black Stars in Brazil and how much he/she was paid. The crooked John Mahama paid his brother $1.5 million to transport $ ...
read full comment
The transaction is not an arm-length deal. There is apparent conflict of interest, which is not what NPP promised Ghanaians. Why wasn't it an open market deal? Why restricted to sole source, and with an investor closer to the ...
read full comment
AUTHOR: STEPHEN DONKOR -------- Hei, NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONCERT(NDC) should be ready to stay in opposition for eternity. Considering the prudent economic foundation the NPP has started to put in place by reducing taxes, tack ...
read full comment
The coupon rate is too high so government should invest it wisely. The rate is above commercial lending rate by the banks in Ghana. I teams that the banks dollar lending rate is cheaper than the coupon rate
* It means that the banks dollar lending rate in ghana is cheaper than the bond
Do the banks in Ghana have that much to lend ?
Already the government under Mahama owed them so much.
If it were possible don't you think it would have been done that way?
The NDC members of parliament are so disorganised that they sound more like an empty barrel make comments just about everything and seem to forget just under a year ago they the same NDC made same or worse from the bus brandi ...
read full comment
Hilarious now the free money has stopped for Ndc costing Ghana billions in corruption they are picking at anything ...whatvassholes justvwsot PPAs Cxl or "delayed" as they are just corrupt and cost Ghana tooo much now hopeful ...
read full comment
But in saying that yes an investigation is correct
Another avenue to make money. What investigation and who will be members?
NPP cannot investigate NPP. What will expect from that investigation ? Cover up, lies and denials and in the end no wrong doing will be establish after a long delay of the case. Bond was sold in two days but invebsigatiom can ...
read full comment
Harruna,sit well and start from dubious teper useless bounds,sada nada miss nonsenses fake judgement concorted debts ameri demonic deal ,just to say the least.THAT VICE PRESIDENTS HOUSE,talk of it.useless investment.
INCREASE YOUR LIBIDO WHILES ENHANCING YOUR SEXUAL PERFORMANCE WITH MORE ENERGY AND STAMINA. USE VITAL 5 WITH MULTI MACA ( save your marriage ).0572174551
(1). USE VITAL 5 WITH MULTI MACA have a special property which enhan ...
read full comment