Chiefs and landowners urged to make lease acquisition flexible

Kumasi, Aug 10, GNA - Mr Lawrence Agyinsam, Ashanti Regional Branch Manager of the Unique Trust Financial Services Limited, has made an appeal to traditional authorities and the Lands Commission to harmonise their procedures to make it more flexible for landlords to acquire lease documents to their property.

He said the inability of most businessmen in the Kumasi metropolis who were also land and property owners to provide lease documents to serve as guarantee, was impeding their efforts to contract loans from financial institutions to expand their businesses.

Mr Agyinsam made the appeal at a product education programme to introduce the various financial products being offered by the company to a cross section of businessmen in Kumasi on Tuesday.

He said the inability of most entrepreneurs to access loans due to the lack of leases, which were the legal document to serve as a collateral was of great concern to financial services providers, which were prepared to assist them to expand their business operations.

Mr Agyinsam appealed to the Asantehene to use his good offices to ensure that procedures used to acquire lease documents were made flexible so that landlords could use them to acquire loans to expand their businesses in order to boost business activities in the region. He said the company which operated as a non-banking financial institution offered financial products such as emergency loans, special purpose loans, business loans, working capital financing and group guarantee loans.

Other services were fixed assets improvement loans, stopgap loans, import/export finance, collateral management, warehousing, funeral loans, business advisory services and future leaders' education assistant plan.

He said the company had so far granted a total of 20 billion cedis as loans to 151 clients in the region since it started its operations in October 2003.

Mr Agyinsam said the company had positioned itself to satisfy the needs of the increasing demands of the business public who otherwise would not have been catered for by the traditional banks.