Vice-President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has said the government will protect all deposits in licensed financial institutions as the process of sanitizing the financial system goes on.

Dr Bawumia said this in his keynote address at the 22nd Annual National Banking Conference of the Chartered Institute of Bankers, Ghana, in Accra on Tuesday, 27 November 2018.

“In the process of sanitizing the banking sector, we have to be very cognizant of the fact that we have to protect depositors of the licensed financial institutions,” he stated, adding that: “The sanitization of the financial system cannot be at the expense of depositors because we need the confidence of the depositors to maintain the stability of the system.”

The Governor of the central bank, Dr Ernest Addison recently said many commercial banks are close to meeting the Bank of Ghana's GHS400 million Minimum Capital Requirement (MCR) as the 31 December 2018 deadline approaches.

Dr Addison also said the BoG is monitoring the savings and loans as well as the microfinance sphere to mop up the “distressed institutions in the sector” with the help of the Ministry of Finance.

Ahead of the deadline, seven local banks have already gone under.

They include UT Bank and Capital Bank, which were taken over by the state-owned GCB Bank in August 2017.

In August 2018, five other struggling local banks: The Beige Bank, The Royal Bank, The Construction Bank, uniBank and Sovereign Bank, were all put together to form the all-new state-owned Consolidated Bank Ghana (CBG).