Opinions of Friday, 12 October 2012

Columnist: Blankson, Nana Kow

Martin Amidu Is The Biggest Hoax

By Nana Kow Blankson

Ever since Martin Amidu was summarily dismissed as Attorney General by the late President Mills for showing gross disrespect, this shameless man has tried to portray that he is the cleanest man or politician money can buy in Ghana.

Martin Amidu, who could not win a single case as Attorney General but rather rushed to court very unprepared leading to series of humiliating court defeats, has unsuccessfully been trying hard since he was dismissed from office, to win the hearts of Ghanaians by labeling the NDC government as corrupt without bringing any credible evidence to back his shameless claims.

This man has been sitting in his office and we see him weekly unleashing salvos of ammunition to slam or damn the ruling NDC government. The other day the man went so overboard that he even stated the exact amounts that he had retired as imprest since he started serving as a public official. He had been doing all this to give the impression that he had never, ever involved himself in any uncanny act or done anything fishy in his life. Due to the way he had portrayed himself to the public I believe the time has come to put Martin Amidu on a microscopic view so that Ghanaian will be the best judges.

Ghana is a country of laws, and one of the laws enshrined in the country’s constitution enjoins every businessman/woman to file their annual Income Tax. There are no excuses for not filing your Income Tax, and in fact it is even a criminal offense very known to most Ghanaians for not filing your Income Tax.

If that is the case no one has any excuse for skipping this obligation as a businessman/ woman for even a year. The situation becomes terrible when you refuse to file your Income Taxes for well over a decade. That is exactly what “Saint” Martin Amidu did for well over a decade by blatantly refusing to file his annual Income Taxes. But a day after Martin Amidu was nominated by the late President Mills to head the Interior Ministry in 2010, Martin Amidu saw his folly. He realized there and then that if this issue about non-filling of Income Taxes is leaked to the opposition NPP, his nomination would be still-born.

What self-appointed “Saint” Martin Amidu did next amounts to a criminal offence. He frantically called some friends and eventually secretly reached a friend at the Internal Revenue Service who is one of the top guns there. After informing him of his predicament, Martin Amidu committed crime by colluding with that official to file his Income Taxes for well over a decade.

This was something Martin Amidu did so that during his vetting process at Parliament no one could bring that issue out. By doing this Ghanaians should judge if Martin Amidu is a clean man or whether he has any moral right to call somebody corrupt.

Martin Amidu committed this crime even before he went through the parliamentary vetting to head the Ministry of Interior. I am challenging him if has two balls in his legs to come out to deny this story. I have all the evidence, the date that the taxes were filed, where it was done and which IRS officials helped him out. I have their names, their offices and many more.

I am asking Martin Amidu to come out and tell the whole country that he never committed such an offence. Martin Amidu is someone gravely suffering from something I will let Ghanaians know in my next article. He had been to the UK several times to take care of this issue since the days of Rawlings, and I think it’s about time Ghanaians know the whole story and make a determination whether to take Martin Amidu serious or not.

nkowblankson@yahoo.com