A Canadian investor, Mr. J.S. Gilchrist, is threatening to sue Maxwell Kofi Jummah, Steve Ntim, Atta Kyea and Roy Duodu-Sarpong, all leading members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), and a Canadian businessman, Costas Manios, for fraud.

He is also accusing the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) of breach of contract.

He contends that the above mentioned people are also scheming to dupe Ghanaians!

Through a petition to President Mills, which has been intercepted by The Herald, Gilchrist is hoping that the matter will be investigated, and resolved in order to save Ghana from being blacklisted by Canadian investment companies, including CIDA which funds a lot of activities in Ghana.

According to Gilchrist, in 2003, Messrs Duodu-Sarpong and Manios informed him that the KMA needed a Waste-To-Energy (WTE) facility to purchase. The facility is capable of safely processing 1,600 tonnes of waste per day (that is all the waste in Kumasi for everyday) to generate 32 megawatts of electricity that will provide power for 1,200 homes.

Excited, he proceeded to Ghana in 2004, only to realize that the KMA did not have the resources to purchase the facility.

Subsequently, his company, Cinergex Solutions Limited and the KMA, then headed by Mr. Maxwell Kofi Jummah, signed a contract that year, 2004, based on the assurance that, if Cinergex Solutions could build and own the facility, the KMA would ensure that the ECG paid a price high enough to justify the project.

Extensive discussions among the KMA, the Public Utility Revenue Commission (PURC) and the ECG finally paved the way for the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) to be signed in February, 2007.

For the first year, Cinergex Solutions was to be paid 7.5 cents kilowatt hour; 10 cents for the next fourteen years and another, unspecified, increase in year 15 for the balance of the contract.

The PPA, according to Gilchrist, provided that his company operated the facility for 20 years, after which it would be sold to the KMA for a symbolic US$1.

He said Mr. Steve Ntim was introduced to him as the key local contact, a key advisor to the then President, Mr. J.A. Kufuor, and also the brother of Duodo-Sarpong.

Other local businessmen – contractors, surveyors, bankers and so on, supposed to provide top quality service in the building and operation of the WTE were also introduced to him.

However, he realized that during his several visits to Ghana, anytime it appeared that they were making progress towards the commencement of the construction of the WTE, a problem cropped up.

He cited the case of having been assured that there would be no need for conducting an environmental assessment, since the landfill at which the facility would be sited had already undergone a comprehensive assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), only for him to learn later that, that was not true.

He said during one of his visits, Ntim introduced a general contractor, Prefos Limited, to him, “who would be capable of doing the site work, pouring the foundation, as well as assisting with the erection of the power cables between the landfill and the nearest electrical substation”.

However, for Prefos to provide him with a formal quotation, it took the company five months to only write and say:

“This is to inform you that we have now received the whole drawing for the transmission line from the ECG so work is progressing on the final proposal which will be forwarded to you very soon”.

“No further communication, and, in particular, no detailed quotation was even forwarded by this contractor hand-picked by Ntim”, Gilchrist noted, naively thinking that it was simply a less than an aggressive pursuit of business, which he would later find out to be something far more sinister.

Now, the 2008 elections were around the corner, and according to Gilchrist, it only made sense to him that his Ghanaian counterparts in the business, who are also politicians, would be occupied with preparations for the event, hence they would have no time for communications.

However, he was taken aback when he received a letter from Kofi Jummah, now Deputy Minister for Local Government, Rural Development and Environment, saying that the project had been cancelled, and that they had no “alternative but to assign the contract to a more serious and credible Waste-To-Energy Company”.

The strange thing about the letter, Gilchrist observed, was that it was written on December 31, 2008 and received on January 6, 2009, when Jummah was well aware that his government had lost the election.

He considered Jummah’s action as inappropriate and that of overstepping his authority, given the fact that his party and government had lost election weeks before, and hence he had no mandate to be making policy decisions.

Moreover, Cinergex Solutions Ltd did not sign any contract with Jummah as representing the Ghanaian Government, but had rather signed an agreement with a municipality and a company.

Additionally, the two contracts – the one with KMA and that with ECG – contained clauses that provided for either party calling for resolution of complaints, and there was no provision for any peremptory dismissal by any of the signatories to the contract.

The reason for Jummah’s letter, according to Gilchrist, dawned on him when he was led to discover that two months prior to the letter and less than three weeks after the supposed letter of quotation from Prefos, Jummah had hosted Manios and the representative of another Canadian company, EITI, claiming to have WTE technology.

Gilchrist stated that, Jummah was even bold enough to have granted an extensive media interview “wherein he indicated that the new vendor, EITI Ltd. would cost the people of Ghana $250 million”.

He disclosed that EITI had no WTE technology, and that its principals were in agreement with his company to be distributors of his technology.

They, EITI, had even signed a “Comprehensive Non-Disclosure and Non-Competition Agreement, with his Gilchrist Company, thereby making their mission in Ghana an “utter violation of the terms of that agreement”.

Pointing out Jummah’s intent to perpetrate fraud on him and Ghanaians, Gilchrist noted that Jummah knew very well that Manios and Duodu-Sarpong and others captured in the picture accompanying the media coverage of the EITI event, were agents of his company “and, as such, would certainly have been in contravention of their agency responsibilities under both Ghanaian and Canadian laws.

He threatened: “These are matters which will be decided in a Canadian court of law, as I will be pursuing civil action for breach of contract”.

According to Gilchrist, following the realization of what had happened, he tried to reach the ECG several times but failed, and therefore, wrote to Atta Kyea, the lawyer, introduced to him by Ntim as part of the team.

He said he did not get any reply from him, but rather a letter from the ECG, “indicating that, if the project was not operational within one month, the PPA would be considered null and void”.

He wondered why the ECG did not consider the arbitration process as captured in the PPA and why the letter from them (ECG) was coming to him, soon after his letter to Atta Kyea, when there had not been any previous communication registering any disapproval with how the project was being handled.

He maintained: “That he had no contractual relationship with the NPP government, “save and except the written offer to guarantee the payments by the ECG and to guarantee the waste supply from the KMA”. Therefore, the letter from Jummah represented “oppression and abuse of power”.

According to him, Jummah did not act in good faith, as proven by his association with the EITI Ltd. event.

And that, his agents, Manios and Duodu-Sarpong and the other Ghanaians, who had been “privy to all aspects of the contract with my company, had a fiduciary obligation to us, and their underhand efforts to recruit another company, are clearly a breach of those obligations”.

Gilchrist argued that the KMA, in hosting EITI and claiming to have signed a contract with them, were in a breach of their contract with his company.

He asserted that EITI was in breach of a non-competition, non-disclosure agreement with his company. And that, all the claims by EITI as having developed a WTE technology and having sold $12 million worth of “carbon credit” related to the Kumasi facility, which they claimed would be operational in 2009, as posted on their website, were all false, and a scheme to dupe Ghanaians.

When The Herald spoke to Jummah on the matter, he denied having done anything to disrupt the agreement and the process of building a WTE facility in Kumasi or attempting to perpetrate any fraud on Ghanaians.

“Since I ceased being the mayor of Kumasi, I ceased being in any position to influence the contract and the related operations to the building of the WTE facility in Kumasi”, said Jummah.

However, The Herald has in its possession a letter written to Gilchrist by Jummah as the Deputy Minister of Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment, misinforming him apparently, that an environmental assessment had already been conducted on the landfill site, hence there was no need for one.

As for Lawyer Atta Kyea, he said nobody had engaged him as a lawyer because he had never received any remuneration from anybody in connection with the project; hence he was not accountable to anybody in the matter.