The specter that a gang of ex-criminals will occupy the Presidency some day is hovering over the country with the uncovering of yet another ex-convict among the inner circle of NPP flagbearer, Nana Akufo-Addo’s campaign team.

This latest ex-convict is Nana Poku Ofori-Atta and the claim is that unlike Yaw Amfo Kwakye and Raymond Amankwa, this cousin of the NPP flagbearer did not do time in jail for drug trafficking but money laundering, an offence that is often the bed-fellow of drug barons and traffickers.

This latest revelation is captured in the September 2011 edition of the Africawatch magazine.

“Nana Poku served jail term in Germany not for dealing in drugs as sources had alleged, but rather for money laundering…during the 2008 election campaign, he and three others—Ken Ofori Atta, Keli Gadzekpo and Edward ‘Bumpty’ Akufo-Addo managed about $47million of Akufo-Addo’s campaign funds from the head office of Databank Financial services Lt in Accra,” the magazine reveals.

With Nana Poku being jailed for money laundering, the specter of illicit drugs hangs around him too as the dubious source of his money is what sent him to jail.

This brings to three the number of ex-convicts in Akufo-Addo’s inner circle, men who will likely take up very key positions in an Akufo-Addo government in the unlikely event that he wins the 2012 elections. The other two ex-convicts are Raymond Amankwa, his brother-in-law who was recently released from a Brazilian jail where he did time for heroine trafficking and Amfo Kwakye, his defacto Chief of Staff who was his special Assistant when he was a cabinet Minister in the Kufuor regime. Amfo Kwakye did time in jail in England for drug trafficking.

According to the Africawatch magazine, many top officials of the NPP are worried and angry that with the revelation of Nana Poku’s criminal record, the NPP “…still had another mess to clean up.”

The image of Nana Akufo-Addo himself is in tartars because of his inability to speak to allegations of wee smoking and cocaine sniffing that has been made against him from various quarters. Some of his long time associates, including Kwesi Pratt and Dr. Kwesi Aning, have confirmed that he smokes wee and sniffs cocaine respectively.

Kwesi Pratt confided in an American diplomat that he has personal knowledge of Akufo-Addo’s drug use and that the NPP flagbearer smokes “…a lot of marijuana…even in the morning, there used to be a cloud around him and you could see that he was high.” Dr. Aning, when asked about Akufo-Addo’s use of cocaine said it was ‘under control’.

According to the Africawatch magazine, “the shady pasts of some of Akufo-Addo’s family members who are aboard his campaign bus may be crippling the NPP’s ability to launch a full-scale attack on one of Mills’ last trump cards; the public perception that he is morally upright. Compared with what is happening to Akufo-Addo and his camp, many Ghanaians say Mills is a saint-squeaky clean and above reproach. It is a political selling point that any candidate would die for – and Mills has it in abundance.”