Pay our locked-up cash in full or we march – CASLOC to government

Members of the Coalition of Affected Savings and Loans Customers (CASLOC) in the diaspora have cast doubt on the government's resolve to pay their locked-up funds in full following financial sector cleanup undertaken by the Bank of Ghana (BoG).

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who admitted that the exercise had caused discomfort to some households, guaranteed 100 percent payment of deposits of customers of the failed financial firms in his “2019 Christmas message" to Ghanaians.

But the leader of CASLOC in the United Kingdom, Mr Albert Owusu, says the government's "wishy-washy" promise is not enough to retrieve monies of the disgruntled customers of the defunct savings and loans companies.

Mr Owusu said it has been a month after the president promised to pay full investment of CASLOC members, meanwhile, the Ministry of Finance has done nothing to pay them.

“When we call the BoG and the Receiver, they say the finance minister hasn’t released any funds to speed up the process or is it because it’s an election year so government wants to say anything to calm us down,” he lamented.

The London-based Ghanaian expressed disappointment in the Receiver’s payment approach and accused the government for discriminating against customers of the failed second-tier banks.

"Why did the government not migrate us straight away like the universal banks? These institutions were all regulated by BoG, so why the discrimination? This isn’t fair to the vulnerable ones in the financial sector" Mr Owusu complained.

He told Class News' Maxwell Attah that the group will embark on series of protest against the government to demand their monies if the BoG fails to respond to their plight.

He, therefore, implored the BoG to either pay full investment of every depositor or migrate them to a solvent Universal Bank just as the government did to customers of the failed first-tier banks.

The group, on 10 January 2020 kicked against plans by the Receiver and the central bank to pay them a cap amount of GHS20,000 and further reiterated their readiness to vote out the government should it fail to pay their full investment before the 2020 polls.