Business News of Thursday, 24 August 2023

Source: www.ghanaweb.com

GNPC-Genser deal: Mines Committee did not show how claims of losses were inaccurate - ACEP

Ben Boakye is Executive Director for ACEP Ben Boakye is Executive Director for ACEP

The Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Energy Policy (ACEP), Benjamin Boakye, has poked holes into the response by the Mines and Energy Committee to the issues raised concerning the GNPC-Genser deal.

According to him, the response did not address the issues as it should have.

“The Committee did not show how that statement is inaccurate as to why Ghana is not losing 1.5 billion Dollars.

“What they just did was to do some basic arithmetic of the discount to arrive at around $ 1.4 billion and assumed that 1.4 billion is not being lost because GNPC will use the transition line over a 16-year period. That of course doesn’t look at the garment of the issues that we have raised on this very transaction,” he was quoted by 3news.com.

The ACEP and IMANI reports raised concerns over a Gas Sales Agreement (GSA) between GNPC and Genser Energy Ghana Limited (GEGL), asserting that Ghana stood to lose the “whopping and galactic sum of US$1.5billion” due to this arrangement.

The allegations raised by ACEP and IMANI claimed GNPC sold gas to Genser at significantly reduced rates compared to its purchase price, resulting in a perceived subsidy. Following an 11-month-long investigation, the Parliamentary Committee has refuted the claims made by ACEP and IMANI, stating that the GSA is not a “sweetheart contract”.

The committee in response noted that it found the computation methods used by ACEP and IMANI faulty.

It said the CSOs calculated a hypothetical loss based on the contractual sum of US$2.79/MMBtu. But that price reflects offsets from a capacity charge of US$3.29/MMBtu.

SSD/DAG

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