News:
September 11, 2018
As pressure mounts from civil society, for the Finance Committee to hold public hearing on the collapsed of the seven indigenous banks, Member of Parliament for Suhum, Fredrick Opare Ansah defended the in-camera hearing.
According to the Suhum legislator both media and members of the Finance Committee have the responsibility to the citizenry of Ghana as the matter being looked at is very sensitive.
He further added that unlike the Public Account that knew way ahead of time questions to ask from the report of the Auditor General’s report, issue of the collapse of the banks the committee did not know where they were going as said by the chairman of the committee.
And lamented over the practice where the media was constantly fueling the crusade for public hearing for the work of the Finance Committee.
Mr. Fredrick Opare Ansah emphasised that some of the issues that could have arisen from the information gathering process, could potentially be injurious to the banking sector, “we need to protect the entire sector not because we want to hide something”, he lamented.
“Can you imagine we hold public hearing and during and during the hearing it emerges that, there is weakly supervision and regulations and that depositors’ funds are not saved in any bank, do you know what would happened?”
The Suhum lawmaker and a member of the Finance committee said, the next day there would be panic withdrawals of fund all across the country, meanwhile if we have had in-camera sitting we would have tighten legislation to protect depositors funds.
Chairman of the Finance Committee Dr. Mark Asibey Yeboah, questioned Journalist who were not invited to cover the in-camera information gathering of the Committee, “why are you not questioning workings of Economic and Organised Crime (ECOCO), why they are not having public hearing”.
Bear with us, you know we are not here to cover up for any ones rot, Member of Parliament for Suhum said, when ghanamps.com wanted to know if there would be public hearing going into the future.
By: Kwaku Sakyi-Danso/ghanamps.com