The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Micro-finance and Small Loans Centre (MASLOC) Steven Amoah has revealed that some politicians, musicians and private business owners will soon be hauled before the courts for issuing dud cheques amounting to over ?800,000 to the centre.
He said the cheques were issued by these individuals when the centre intensified its loan recovery mechanism, since it is owed over 90 million cedis by loan defaulters.
In an interview with TV3, Mr. Amoah said measures have been put in place to retrieve such monies owed defaulters.
“Over 800,000 cheques have bounced and some come from politicians, interestingly, some come from NDC some from NPP, some from Musicians, and some come from entrepreneurs in Ghana”
He said, “I’m using your platform to tell them that sometimes as a matter of being ethical we don’t want to be too harsh on them when it comes to these issues but very soon they will be prosecuted.”
According to him, other measures being considered include publishing of names of defaulters in the dailies.
He however stated that, over a one year period of disbursement, ?16 Million has been recovered indicating an improvement in the level of recoveries by the centre. Also, he said monetization, which is one of its major challenges will be addressed by the President soon.
“Talking about recovery, 2017… you know we give out cars, loans, tricycles, outboard motors and stuff like that. We were able to recover together an asset value of about ?16 million as against less that ?6 million the previous year”.
He also mentioned MASLOC is on a strategy to eliminate partisanship so that when there is a change of administration the entity can still operate as it ought to.