A private legal practitioner and a member of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) has described the leak of a purported ‘prosecutorial list’ from the Office of the Special Prosecutor(OSP) as a reckless move by Martin Amidu, ABC News Ghana can report.

Commenting on the list circulating in the media on an Accra based radio station and monitored by ABC News Ghana, Edudzi Tameklo noted that the Act establishing the office of the Special (Act 959) allows the office to only give an update to the general public on half-yearly basis. According to Act 959, Section 3, he said, the report should give a status update of the cases handled by the office.

“The office shall on half yearly basis publish the following information in at least two daily newspapers of national circulation and on the website of the office: a. the list of corruption cases investigated and prosecuted by the office and the number of acquittals, convictions and cases pending in respect of cases prosecuted under paragraph A and the value proceeds of recovered if any,” lawyer Tameklo quoted.

With respect to the Act establishing the office, Edudzi Tameklo could not fathom why such a list can be leakedwhen it does not satisfy the requirements of the Act.

According to Mr. Tameklo, the list of cases circulating in the media purported to have come from the office of the special prosecutor are petitions people have sent to the office to be investigated. Such cases, Mr. Tameklo said, have not even been assigned to investigators not to talk of prosecutions. He adds therefore that putting such information in the public domain may create credibility issues for the affected persons who may not necessarily be guilty of the crimes mentioned.

“Unfortunately, when you analyze the list, with the exception of one – even with that one the office has not even commenced “proper prosecutions”. They only went to the court for an order of the court. So as we speak, technically there is no a docket from the office before the court of law commencing legal prosecutions of anybody. So you need to be very cautious of the information that you put out,” Mr. Edudzi admonished.