Mannaseh Azure Awuni writes: The Faces Behind the $74 Million Scandal and Their Roles

In my final post about the waste bins scandal, which the Jospong Group’s Sophia Kudjordji rubbished on TV3, I’ll summarise the main actors behind the scandal and the roles they played.

JULIUS DEBRAH, CHIEF OF STAFF
1. Julius Debrah, who was the Chief of Staff in 2016, when the deal was cooked, wrote a letter to the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Collins Dauda, to procure one million waste bins for distribution to households in assemblies across Ghana.

2. Mr. Julius Debrah also wrote to the Minister of Finance to make provision in the 2017 budget for the procurement of one million litre bins.

3. I did not get evidence that Julius Debrah took part in the procurement process or the inflation of the prices besides these instructions. But there was one important thing he should have known.

4. Before becoming the Chief of Staff, Julius Debrah was the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development. Collins Dauda replaced him.

5. During Julius Debrah’s time as minister, the Local Government Ministry procured 155,000 waste bins from Qualiplast, the leading plastics producer in Ghana.

6. During my investigation, I discovered that Qualiplast had supplied 100,000 pieces of the waste bins to the ministry, which the ministry was struggling to distribute to households. In the rural areas, the people hardly generate household waste. Some used the 240-litre bins to store water, while others expressed no interest when some assemblies perforated holes in the bins to stop that practice.

7. The company still had 55,000 waste bins to deliver to the Local Government Ministry, but the Ministry said it had not finished distributing the 100,000. If Julius Debrah didn’t know about the latest development, he could have asked for a report before asking that ONE MILLION bins be procured, when the same ministry could not distribute 100,000 bins.

COLLINS DAUDA, MINISTER OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT
1. He was the Local Government Minister who took over from Julius Debrah. At the time he awarded the contract for the one million bins and 900,000 bin liners, thousands of bins were wasting away at the assemblies across the country. I have evidence of this in the video on my Facebook wall and my website.

2. The contract was awarded to five companies, all belonging to the Jospong Group, owned by Joseph Siaw Agyepong of the Jospong Group. The leading producers of plastics in Ghana were left out, but some of the Jospong companies that were awarded the contract did not produce any plastics.

3. The total contract sum was $74 million: $60 million for the one million waste bins and $14,040,000 for the 900,000 bin liners (the polythene used to line the waste bins to avoid sticking).

4. The contract price was inflated by $34.3 million. I went to the same Jospong companies for invoices, which were far lower than the price they quoted in the government contract. I was buying only 500 pieces of bins and bin liners.

5. For instance, the Jospong Group quoted the price of each bin liner at 98 pesewas. To get whole numbers, let’s round it up to GHS1, or $0.23. This means the Jospong Group was selling to me at $0.23 a piece but quoting to the government at $15.6 per bin liner.

I was buying 500 pieces, and the government was buying 900,000 pieces.

6. Using the price quotation I got from Jospong, the 900,000 bin liners the government procured should have cost $207,000, but the cost was $14,040,000 on the contract documents. Yes, $14 million for something that cost $207k.

7. It is surprising that the minister did not question the price of a disposable polythene bag sold for $15.6 as far back as 2016.

JOSEPH SIAW AGYEPONG
1. Joseph Siaw Agyepong, is the CEO of Zoomlion and Chairman of the Jospong Group of Companies.

2. In DECEMBER 2016, Joseph Siaw Agyepong made a public announcement at the 10th anniversary durbar of Zoomlion in Accra to thunderous applause.

“We were the first company to distribute FREE waste bins to households in Ghana. Currently, we have distributed 200,000. Our vision is to distribute one million FREE waste bins to all households in the year 2017,” he told the audience, which included President John Mahama, some of his ministers of state, and Chairman of the Church of Pentecost, who rallied “politicians in government and opposition” to support Zoomlion’s business.

3. Unknown to his audience and the media, a $74 million contract had been awarded to the Jospong Group to supply one million waste bins and 900,000 disposable bin liners. The contract was awarded in NOVEMBER 2016.

4. The invoices I took from the Jospong Group showed that the companies were aware of the price inflation of both the bin liners and the waste bins. It makes no sense that a contract worth $207k is sold to the government for $14 million.

5. Joseph Siaw Aygepong is very involved in the contracts his companies sign with the government. Recently, he appeared before Parliament’s committee to discuss Zoomlion’s contract with the YEA, in which GHS850 is allocated to each sweeper. The contract says Zoomlion should keep GHS600, and GHS pays the sweepers GHS250 a month. Mr. Agyepong probably saw the inflated prices his companies quoted to the government.

THE PUBLIC PROCUREMENT AUTHORITY
1. The Local Government Ministry, led by Collins Dauda, requested approval to handpick the Jospong companies for the contract. The PPA should have questioned the reason for those companies while others were more capable of supplying the product.

2. The Ministry said the bins were needed urgently to curb a possible cholera outbreak as the nation approached another rainy season. The request was made in October, when we were approaching the dry season.

3. The PPA granted approval, without even questioning the outrageous prices quoted in the request letter from the Ministry of Local Government.

GOOD NEWS
The $74 million contract was cancelled after my investigation. Zoomlion had not delivered, and payment had not been made when I broke the story.

I helped the police investigate this and the fumigation deal awarded to 11 companies of the Jospong Group within the period, but the government refused to prosecute the case. Unlike the waste bins contract, over GHS200,000 million had been paid for the fraudulent fumigation contract, and the money was not retrieved.