A private legal practitioner has questioned Parliament’s decision to leave out the directors of the defunct banks in their recent probe into the financial crisis.
Nii Arday Clegg argued that, the directors of the banks are well vest with information on whatever went on and would have the information that Parliament sought to unravel with their probe.
The Managing Partner at Nii Arday Clegg & Co., a corporate law firm stated that with that in mind Parliament had no business excluding the directors from the probe.
“It’s hard to understand how any enquiry can be done without asking those who hold ultimate responsibility to come and talk about it,” he told Samson Lardy Anyenini on news analysis show, Newsfile Saturday.
The corporate lawyer added that Parliament’s exclusion of the directors from the probe is a practice that cannot be found anywhere.
“What you’ll get from the directors, carry more weight than what you’ll get from the rest of the entity,” he noted.
Mr Clegg also took a swipe at the Financial Committee of Parliament for sticking with an in-camera probe despite all the calls on the committee to make the three-day probe public.
The committee has, however, defended their stance; arguing that opening the probe to the public can cause the financial sector and the entire economy to collapse if the information that goes out is not properly managed.
“If care is not taken and an information goes out there and it is not managed well, before that comment which may be a lie could be withdrawn, the harm may be caused to the industry and if you collapse the finance sector the entire economy will collapse,” Bia MP, Richard Acheampong told Joy News.
Bia East MP, Richard Acheampong
But challenging this argument, Mr Clegg said keeping the information from the public would rather create problems since people would be left to speculate.
“When you leave [peoeple] to speculate, it leaves more problems for you…openness is what brings healing and closure,” he said.
Nii Arday’s arguments come after Parliament concluded its probe into the banking crisis that has left seven indigenous banks with a new title, defunct.
Capital bank and UT bank were taken over by state owned GCB bank in August 2017 after they ran into liquidity challenges.
A year later, five other banks have gone down, forcing the regulator; Bank of Ghana to merge them to form the Consolidated Bank Ghana.
Some of the banks are said to have obtained their licenses under false pretences while some officials of others are cited to have misappropriated depositors’ cash and bailouts from BoG.