The Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr Ernest Addison, has predicted that the yet-to-be-released BoG report will reveal a high revenue loss for the country.
According to him, the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP) is to be blamed for the significant loss.
Responding to questions posed by the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, Dr Addison disclosed that the delay in producing the report is partly due to a lot of work being done by the auditors to assess the level of impact of the DDEP.
“The reason being the domestic debt exchange that the government had to undertake. As you’re aware, most of the banks are lending to government in various instruments.
“So there has been a lot of work being done by the auditors in trying to assess the impact of the exchange. As we recently pointed out, we had to write to the Ministry of Finance to notify him of the delay,” he explained.
Dr Addison stated that the DDEP ended recently with cocoa bill and dollar denominated bonds included.
This, he said required the central bank to ask for more time to properly examine the situation and put together a comprehensive statement.
“The domestic debt exchanges ended last week; the cocoa bill, the dollar-denominated bills – they were only settled last week. So all of these have an impact on the Bank of Ghana’s account.”
“But I can confirm that we will make a significant loss in 2022,” he added.
The Domestic Debt Exchange Programme was introduced in December 2022 as part of conditions to reprofile Ghana’s growing debt stock. It was also a prerequisite exercise to secure an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout request of $3 billion.
Although the DDEP was met with severe opposition and disgruntlement by various stakeholder bodies, the government eventually succeeded in executing it.