By William
Yaw Owusu
Monday August
06, 2018
Government has reportedly withdrawn the re-negotiated
deal the Ministry of Energy signed with Africa & Middle East Resources
Investment Group, otherwise known as AMERI Group.
The supposed new deal has sparked heated
controversy regarding the amount involved since it was put before parliament
for approval before the house went on recess last week.
It was the then Mahama-led NDC
government that first signed the Built Own Operate and Transfer (BOOT) agreement
with AMERI sometime in 2015 for the supply of 256mw of power but when it
emerged that Ghana was losing about $150million as a result of the lack of due
diligence on the part of officials who negotiated the deal, the new NPP
government decided to investigate the whole transaction by setting up a
ministerial committee.
At the time, the 17-member committee chaired
by lawyer Phillip Addison after investigations recommended to the government
that it should call back owners of the Dubai-based company for re-negotiation
and advised that should the company refuse to honour the invitation for
re-negotiation, the government should renounce the agreement on grounds of
fraud.
The initial deal AMERI signed with the
NDC government had a total of $510 million for five years with the applicable
tariff charge for Ghana at U.S. cents 14.5918/KWh.
The new deal presented to parliament by
Energy Minister Boakye Agyarko would have seen a new company, Mytilineous
International Trading Company, taking over from AMERI at a proposed capacity
charge of 3.8052 US cents/KWh for a 15-year period with an applicable tariff
charge of U.S. cent 11.7125/KWh; two and a half years into Ghana owning the
power plant.
But cabinet had withdrawn the letter
sent to parliament, giving executive backing to the new deal.
Purported
Letter
In the ensuing heat, there has been an emergence
of a letter purportedly coming from AMERI claiming that it was not involved in the
discussions about the revised power deal, a claim the ministry is currently
disputing.
AMERI Energy in the said letter addressed
to Mr. Agyarko indicated that it was not aware of the new power deal, saying, “We
have recently been following the news circulating in the media about the
Novation of Ameri BOOT Agreement. For purposes of the said novation, we were
given an impression by the new party that all the permits, permissions and
requisite approvals from the stakeholders (ie. Ministry of Finance, Attorney
General’s Office, VRA, PURC) have been obtained before presenting this amended
draft to the cabinet and the president for approval.”
“As
you are fully aware, we have never been involved with your ministry in any kind
of negotiations or discussions related to this Novation and Amendment
Agreement. Moreover, also never had insight of any commercial discussion
between you and the new party, therefore could not have verified that the above
permissions were not obtained at the time of presentation before the parliament,”
the letter stated.”
AMERI threatened
to sue the government for unpaid arrears
“Through
this letter, we would like to serve you this final notice of default of our
outstanding payment of $82,660,560, duly acknowledged by you through your memo
presented to the Parliament dated 25th of July 2018. In this respect, several
notices have been duly served and received by your ministry, but no remedial
action has been taken.”
“We
would like to draw your attention that in the event that your ministry does not
settle our outstanding payments immediately, we will be left with no option but
to draw down on the standby letter of credit (SBLC) to recover part of our
outstanding payments and adopt the legal remedy available to us,” the letter
warned.
Local
Representative
Interestingly, a separate letter of July
24, 2018, with reference number AME/LT/GHA/00/18/014, signed by Maher Al Alili,
Acting CEO of AMERI Energy, is showing that AMERI purportedly authorised its
Ghanaian representative called Nicholas Mawuse Addo to “initial” the Novation
and amendment agreement on the company’s behalf.
Nana Damoah, who is a spokesperson of
the Ministry of Energy, confirmed on Citi
FM in Accra over the weekend that AMERI asked its local representative to
be part of the negotiations for the revised deal and also said the ministry did
not have a copy of the denial letter purportedly coming from AMERI.
“We have received no such letter [of denial]….
We are (rather) in a possession of a letter of authorization that AMERI Energy
gave to an individual to initiate the agreement. So if, indeed, AMERI did
author that letter [of denial], then that position is a direct contradiction of
what they have authored earlier and so we have enough grounds to question the
authenticity of the document that is making the rounds. The letter of
authorization gave permission to an individual to sign the agreement which was
presented to parliament. What this meant was that they are in agreement to the
terms of the deal that was laid before parliament,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment