General News of Friday, 29 September 2017

Source: peacefmonline.com

Abu Jinapor opens up on A Plus corruption allegations

Deputy Chief of Staff, Samuel Abu Jinapor Deputy Chief of Staff, Samuel Abu Jinapor

Deputy Chief of Staff, Samuel Abu Jinapor, has denied pressurizing the CEO of Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr Felix Anyah into giving a revenue-collection contract to another institution for financial favours.

Kwame Asare, aka A-Plus, accused Abu Jinapor and Francis Asenso-Boakye, all Deputy Chiefs of Staff, of being corrupt because they forced the Korle-Bu CEO to give a revenue-collection contract to uniBank after the same contract had been given to a wholly-foreign-owned bank.

A-Plus’ allegation was described as “baseless” and “without merit” by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) which probed the issue after it was referred to them by President Nana Akufo-Addo.

However, a leaked audiotape of a conversation between A-Plus and Deputy Chief of the CID, ACP Maame Tiwaa Addo-Danquah, has emerged raising questions on the credibility of the report or conclusion drawn by the CID.

As far as the Korle-Bu issue is concerned, Jinapor said he never influenced Korle-Bu to revert the contract to uniBank in exchange for financial favours.

"First of all, there was no question about giving a contract, that’s number one. It was about a process to lead to selecting a bank to collect revenue at Korle-Bu and a complaint was that the process was sole-sourced. If you want, and even if you interrogated uniBank’s account, it will even not fall within the bracket of sole-sourcing because in sole-sourcing, you would still have to go to the procurement authority for permission and if it is restrictive tendering, you still … and I tend to have a bit of appreciation of these matters because I tend to deal with those matters at our office, so it had nothing to do with giving a contract to a particular bank.

It had everything to do with process so you couldn’t even have gone to tell Korle-Bu that ‘give uniBank a contract’ and the truth is that we don’t even need to split hairs about it, I mean I spoke to Dr Anyah for 1min:30secs" he told Kwami Sefa Kayi in an interview on Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" Friday.

The deputy Chief of Staff further stated that he does not intend taking any legal action against A-Plus over the corruption allegation the latter levelled against him since Ghanaians are discerning enough and can better judge the issue on its own merit.

Click on the audio above to listen to the entire interview.