By William
Yaw Owusu
Monday July
16, 2018
Details are emerging about how the committee set up
by the Chief Justice to investigate complaints against top officials of the Electoral
Commission (EC) came to the conclusion that the commission’s chairperson,
Charlotte Osei should be booted out of office.
The five-member committee, chaired by Justice
Anthony Alfred Benin of the Supreme Court, recounted how the sacked EC boss, Charlotte
Osei, failed to apply the ‘standards and procedures’ set by the Public
Procurement Act in the award of contracts running into millions of dollars.
Mrs Osei was said to have dished out contracts to individuals
and corporate bodies without due process which showed a possible case of
corruption.
The sacked EC boss, according to the committee, acted
more or less like a procurement officer and unilaterally awarded huge contracts
with virtually no input from other commissioners.
The committee, whose membership also included Justices,
Samuel K. Marful-Sau and Agnes Dodzie, both of the Court of Appeal, as well as
Welbeck Abra-Appiah, a renowned banker and Rose Karikari-Anang, former
Executive Secretary, Ghana Employers Association, investigated only allegations
for which preliminary prima facie
case was established by Chief Justice Sophia A.B. Akuffo that mostly bordered on
serious procurement breaches.
In all, there were six prima facie cases against the
sacked EC boss, and in each case, she was found to have breached the
procurement rules, according to the Committee’s 54-page report.
“We wish to state that the evidence before this
committee clearly shows that the EC, as an entity, did not observe the
provisions of the Public Procurement Act, Act 663 as amended by Act 914,” the
committee said on Page 8 of the report, adding “For example, all the
allegations against the chairperson on procurement that this committee investigated,
no evidence was adduced to show that the EC established and used an Entity
Tender Committee with membership as composed by Act 663 and Act 914 described above.”
“As the evidence will unfold, whenever the ad hoc
Tender Evaluation Panel submitted its report to the Tender Review Panel, Mrs.
Charlotte Osei, who is the Chairperson of the panel, approved the
recommendations alone with an ‘ok minute’ on the report without the involvement
of the two deputy chairpersons,” the committee said.
“The evidence showed that most procurement
activities were done on the recommendations of the Tender Evaluation Panel and
not the Entity Tender Committee and the Central Tender Board, which had the
mandate to approve most of the contracts awarded by the chairperson in view of
the threshold involved.”
The committee said, the EC, through its document
which was not even signed or dated, had sought to ‘unilaterally’ exempt itself
from the application of some provisions of the Public Procurement Act,
regarding the functions of the Central Tender Entity Review Board.
“There is no evidence that the EC applied for and
obtained Parliamentary exemption from fully complying with the provisions of
the Public Procurement Act,” the committee said, adding “Mrs. Charlotte Osei never
allowed the internally created Entity Tender Review Panel, which she chaired,
to work, as evidence on record showed that she approved contracts without the
participation of the other members of the Entity Tender Review Panel.”
The committee observed that the EC “preferred to use
its internally created procurement units rather than those prescribed by the
Procurement Act,” adding “we observed from the evidence that of all the
documents relating to procurement that were exhibited by the chairperson, only
one document showed the use of Members of Parliament in procurement process as
provided under the Public Procurement Act.”
On Page 12 of the report, the committee said the
Public Procurement Act required the EC to have two MPs on the Tender Entity
Committee, whose function was to evaluate tenders and recommend award of
contracts, except contracts that are sole sourced with the approval of the PPA.
However, the committee said “there is no evidence
that the Entity Tender Committee ever met to evaluate tenders and approve the
award of any of the contracts, the subject of all the six allegations
investigated by this committee.”
The committee on Page 47 said “the findings we have
made on the allegations made against Mrs. Charlotte Osei, chairperson of the EC,
clearly give a catalogue of breaches she inflicted on the Public Procurement
Act.”
“In all the procurement activities, which we had to
investigate, the findings have been that Mrs. Charlotte Osei failed to comply
with the Public Procurement Act,” the committee said.
“The procurement activities include the engagement of
Sory@Law as solicitors for the commission; the award of several contracts to
STL; the two contracts for the partitioning and consultancy service of the new
office block; the three contracts awarded for the construction of
Pre-fabricated District Offices of the commission and consultancy thereof; the two
contracts awarded to Dreamoval Ltd and finally, the two contracts awarded to
Quazar Ltd from South Africa.”
The committee said that “evidence before the
committee showed that all these contracts were awarded by Mrs. Charlotte Osei
contrary to the Public Procurement Act.”
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