A Chartered Accountant with the KPMG, giving evidence in the case in which the founder of the defunct Beige Bank is standing trial has been accused of refusing to show pages of documents to “mislead the court” in the ongoing trial.

Julius Ayivor, the first prosecution witness had given evidence and is facing scrutiny from defence lawyers to test the veracity of his testimony.

The former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Beige Bank Limited Michael Nyinaku is being tried for an alleged GH¢1.2 billion theft and has pleaded not guilty.

Under further questioning from Lawyer Thaddeus Sory, counsel for Michael Nyineku, the witness was accused of leaving out pages in his exhibits to mislead the court.

It was the case of counsel that Exhibit H 22 of the witness’s witness statement had just 7 pages, and “you’ve exhibited in your witness statement several other statements to BCAM containing more than 7 pages.

This counsel put to the witness that he had “refused to show us the other 6 pages in other to mislead the court.”

But the witness in his response disagreed.

He said, “Exhibit H 22, was just one page and as I earlier explained, BCAM’s Bank Account statement is so huge that we only decided to extract portions that were relevant to the matters under discussion.”

He added that, “When we were asked to provide the entire listing of BCAMS statements, we did provide that. So any transaction that is not on this Ex H 22, will be contained in those extra information that we provided”

Shown Exhibit H22, counsel said, the suggestion that BCAMS account goes into several pages which is the reason why the witness did not showed the other six pages was incorrect

But the witness in his answer said that “is not true”adding that “I can demonstrate; the BCAM account in question is numbered 10,1003431365. Exhibit H21 has underneath it page 1 of 7, when you look at Exhibit H16, numbered 1000348635, you’ll note that within that statement you’ll note page 1 of 13 and the transaction on that page relate to only April 16, 2018, which means that the notion that BCAMs statement is only 7 pages cannot be correct.

He added that “Because of the volume of transaction that is contained in BCAMs statement we only extracted from the banking software portions that were relevant to the customers in question.

“You’ll also note from mg witness statement, the number of customers whose fixed deposits were moved to BCAM were in excess of 10k customers, what this means on the bank account statement of BCAM 100003481365 you’ll have transactions that will be 10k and over, adding that together with other transactions from the banking software, will be very difficult so to ensure you get the information you require, the reasonable thing we did was to extract portions of BCAM statement as it was relevant to the examples that I cited in my witness statement.

The hearing continues on Friday, February 17, 2023.

Bail

The accused has been granted bail in the sum of GHc200 million with three sureties with two of the sureties the court said should be justified with landed property equivalent to the bail bond and the assets should be valued by the Architectural and Engineering Services Limited (AESL) or Land Valuation Division of the Lands Commission.

He was to deposit his passport with the Court’s registry as well as report every Monday and Friday at 0900 hours to the investigator in the case.

Brief facts

Per the brief facts of the case narrated by Alfred Tuah-Yeboah, Deputy Attorney General, Mr Nyinaku was the former Chief Executive Officer of the Beige Bank and that on August 1, 2018, the Bank of Ghana (BoG) revoked the banking license of Beige Bank and placed it in receivership.

He said a review of the financial and other records of the Bank conducted by the receiver and his team showed several suspicious and unusual transactions, which were subsequently reported to the law enforcement agencies for investigation.

The AG said investigations conducted revealed that between 2015 and 2018, the accused person as CEO of the Bank had allegedly used various means to transfer huge sums of monies to companies related to him and for his personal benefits.

He alleged that the funds transferred were depositors’ funds lodged with the Beige Bank and that between 2017 and 2018, Nyinaku had caused the transfer of GHC10,071.00 fixed deposit account held with Beige Bank in which various customers placed a total of GHC448,636,210.21 to Beige Capital Asset Management Limited, (BCAM), without the knowledge and consent of the customers.