The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Godfred Dame, recently offered a legal opinion on a report written by Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, the former Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee against Illegal Mining (IMCIM), which the National Democratic Congress has urged Ghanaians to reject.
The NDC said that the Attorney-General's advise citing parts of the study as missing evidence is nothing more than a cover-up and an effort to whitewash the scathing findings during a news conference where the party's national communications officer, Sammy Gyamfi, spoke.
In response, the opposition party called the AG's legal counsel "a poor attempt to cover-up" and called him out on it.
The Attorney-General was charged by the NDC of conspiring to protect a number of government and New Patriotic Party officials from prosecution by hiding behind a purported lack of evidence.
The party made references to various sections of the 36-page report written by Prof. Kwabena Frimpong Boateng, a former minister for environment, science, and innovation and chairman of the IMCIM, which claimed that some members of the Akufo-Addo/Bawumia administration and the New Patriotic Party were involved in illegal mining.
The NDC criticized the Attorney-General for neglecting to bring charges against the owners of Heritage Imperial Limited, formerly C&J Aleska, a business whose actions were mentioned in Prof. Frimpong-Boateng's study, citing what the party characterizes to as "corroborative evidence."
The group emphasized that there is a wealth of publicly available material, such as a video by Joy News and the Multimedia group that revealed extensive deforestation in the Kobro section of the Apamprama forest reserve in the Amansie district of the Ashanti region.
The NDC also questioned the Attorney General's choice to postpone prosecuting those it claimed were responsible for the theft and selling of seized excavators. They pointed to individuals like Horace Ekow Ewusi, who Prof. Frimpong-Boateng claimed was responsible for the missing excavators and who was reported to the police at some point in 2019.
The NDC claimed that the report and records kept by the Ghana Police Service provide "smoking gun evidence" that implicates individuals like Ekow Ewusi, John Ofori Atta, a former Central Regional Security Coordinator, and Seth Mantey, a former journalist with Accra's Peace FM, as part of a syndicate that sold at least twenty-seven (27) excavators that had been seized from illegal miners.
The party has thus demanded the resignation of Godfred Yeboah Dame, the Attorney-General's chief, for obfuscating these facts and attempting to pull off what they refer to as a cover-up.
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