Seven years after a project was nurtured by a Ghanaian investor in the tourism industry, pieces of information gathered by GO indicate that a gang of five greedy government appointees (names withheld), who have grown envious of the Shai Hills Safari Project initiated by a local investor in 2000, has began not only scuttling it even before it takes off, but embarked upon a flagrant rape on the community in which the project is to be located.

What the crooks have done, according to GO investigations, is establish a scam project intended at jettisoning and raping the investor, the traditional authorities, and inhabitants living in the various communities in the Shai Hills and, by extension, the nation as a whole.

The parallel project, dubbed the Sun City, is being floated by the gang, including faceless appointees from one Ministry and a department under it. What they have done is launch a website in the name of Falcon Crest Investments Limited, with the view probably of influencing officials of the Lands Commission to get them secure for them documents to the lands where the multi-million dollar project will be sited.

The scam website, according to Lands Commission sources, has the company advertising lands they have not yet acquired, GO`s enquiries revealed last Friday. The scam advert calls for investors in lands to develop schools, clinics, recreational centres, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools etc in the prized vicinity where the project is expected to take off. One such advert appeared in a recent edition of The Daily Graphic, a copy of which is in the possession of GO.

The company, already engaged in servicing parcels of the land in the Shai Hills, hopes to litigate their way through with the dollar component received from unsuspecting investors, according to our Lands Commission source who confirmed the attempt by the cabal to do some skirmishes at the Commission.

Unfortunately, that Lands Commission official turned out to be an indigene of one of the Shai Hills communities. The cabal is also unaware of the fact that he is privy to the programme of a group of GaDangme activists sharpening knives and machetes at Ablekuma and Teshie for a `one man one machete` hit and run battle against agents of the Sun City project.

A check with one aggrieved source at the Ministry of Wildlife had hinted to GO earlier in our investigations of a $3m bribe demanded by the government appointees who had floated the company from the local investor. The wording of the MOU for the project has shifted turf for more than the lifespan of a term of office of a President. The project has gone through the appropriate Committee in Parliament, been discussed several times at Cabinet level and been written about in several correspondences from the Ministry of Tourism through the Parliamentary Committee on Tourism to the Chief Of Staff and the Wildlife Department with little results, just because of the greed of a few government appointees and technocrats!

The Shai Hills Safari Project is the first of its kind in West Africa and has the potential of in several millions of dollars annually in tourism alone to the benefit of the national economy and the indigenes, who scrounge like pigs on a daily menu of hot pepper with boiled unripe banana smuggled by workers to poor homes from a nearby plantation, because of the poverty level in the area.

The project will involve the construction of a 200-room hotel, swimming pools, dams for wildlife, restaurants, recreation facilities, a golf pitch etc. The stunned DCE of Dangme West District, upon hearing of the invasion by the cabal, fired a strongly-worded letter to the agents, warning them of their uninvited presence in the area and the urgent need for them to `suspend all developments on the said land until final settlement at the Arbitration Court.`

The letter also cautioned that `much as we are interested in attracting more investors into the District,` it must be noted that `law and order, peace and the protection of life and property are the prime objectives of the Dangme West District Assembly.`

GO also gathered that lawyers of the Shai Traditional Council, angry at the development together wit the traditional rulers have fired a letter to the agents of Falcon Crest Limited, with copies to the security agencies, just in case they are pushed to the wall. It also states that angry youth from the various communities are also on the alert, with rumours that landguards may be imported from Mallam and Ashaiman to confront the cabal. Information reaching GO is that the leadership of the militant GaDangme Council, aggrieved to the marrow, are sitting on thorns trying hard to restrain these action troopers from striking and taking hostages in the silly rape game.

The opposition, armed with a weapon, are on the rampage in the GaDangme communities, doing damage to the ruling government in an anti-Ashanti propaganda slant expected to translate into anti-Akan, anti-NPP votes in the 2008 elections; even when the President has not been apprised of the burning Shai Hills multi-million dollar scam involving his boys in the Ministry, according to a Chief of Staff source.

One year after the signing of an MOU, a grader and bulldozer brought in at huge cost to the investor to level the project site and create roads in the Reserve for work to begin still sits at the entrance of the Reserve a lame duck.

As GO went to bed Saturday, sources in Parliament say MPs, who have smelled the rot, were planning to have the sector Minister hauled in on the floor of Parliament to defend the `scam` and probably hand over the culprits delaying work on a multi-million dollar project which will link Tema to Accra in a triangle of industrial development.