…£10,000 on 2 weeks London ‘chilling’

…$17,500 on 5 days trip to Havard

The NPP appointed Managing Director of the Daily Graphic has to be stopped now, else he will collapse the company.

Information available to The Republic indicates that Mr. Mohammed Awal is living it up in the world of cash as he continues on a daily basis to amass huge wealth.

Aside colluding with two members of the Board of Directors to get a monthly salary of ¢200million, he has managed to secure the blessings of his party fellows on the Board to go on a spending spree.

Mr. Awal's two-week trip to London for a holiday cost the state-owned media £10,000. Most staff are currently livid with anger because they cannot understand why the Daily Graphic has to pay for the personal holiday enjoyment trips of an employee.

Furthermore, Mr. Awal has worked through his two party henchmen, Nana Akwasi Agyeman IV (Board Chairman) and Mr. Boye (a Board member and chairman of Daily Graphic Finance Committee) to be allocated one billion old cedis for clothing, leave, rent and other unthinkable allowances.

Though the payment of bulk allowance had been cancelled and consolidated in the salary of every employee, Mr. Awal has been able to get Mr. Boye and the Board Chairman to grant him that largess. This is in the face of corporate directives for bulk payment in allowance to be discontinued. On a five-day trip to Harvard, Mr. Awal is reported to have blown a whopping US$17,500. Though he went there for an undisclosed course, insiders insist that trip was not beneficial to the company. They described the Havard trip expenditure as unreasonable.

Staff at Daily Graphic are currently furious over the flamboyant lifestyle of the MD. They said the company is currently not doing well in the media industry.

According to them, the decision by the MD with connivance of two Board members to inflate the former's salary from ¢50million to ¢200million was null and void.

Snippets of information put together indicate that whole board appointed in the era of the NPP did not agree on the conditions of service of their MD.

The procedures usually adopted are that the National Media Commission (NMC) makes proposals which in turn are forwarded to the Board for approval.

Checks at the NMC confirmed that no meetings were held to discuss the salary conditions of Mr. Awal.

Some staff blame the former NMC chairman Paul Adu Gyamfi, another die-hard NPP man for the inability to discuss openly at a well-convened meeting the salary conditions of the Daily Graphic MD.

Mr. Awal’s predecessors, Mr. Appenteng took home ¢50million a month until his contract ended February 2007.

Daily Graphic has an employee staff of not less than 500. Some staff are fuming with rage over the pittance given while the MD and his cohorts wallow in affluence after siphoning money from the company's coffers.