The Ghanaian government has spent ¢14b spent on financial sector clean up

The Minister who was speaking at the 56th annual session of the Ghana Baptist Convention in the Ashanti Region said a huge sum of the money will go into paying disgruntled depositors.

“We are having to spend about 14 billion cedis to be able to give people’s monies back to them and make sure our banking crisis was contained. The expectation is that the receivers will move in strongly to recover these so that we can then begin to give them back to the bigger depositors.”

About the financial sector cleanup

The financial sector cleanup started in August 2017. It reduced banks in the country to 23, savings and loans companies reduced to 25 from 40, finance houses to 11 from 19, and micro-finance and micro-credit lenders to 168, from 554.

This also caused a run on fund managers, which have GHC4 billion tied up in fixed-term investments with banks rescued during the cleanup, as well as savings and loans companies and microlenders. There is another GHC5 billion locked up in illiquid hard-to-retrieve ventures such as unlisted bonds, direct private equity stakes and related party deals with small- to medium-sized companies.

Receivers have been appointed to continue the clean-up processes and pay disgruntled depositors.

The receivers are expected to go in to retrieve good assets and funds invested in wrong ventures by financial institutions whose licenses have been revoked.

Mr Ofori-Atta indicated that depositors with large sums of money will get a maximum of GHC10,000. This he said is to ensure that “at least most people’s monies were not lost”.

Ghana Beyond Aid

As part of his speech, Mr Ofori-Atta emphasized the government’s vision of a Ghana Beyond Aid in the long term and asked for the support of the church in achieving it.

Mr Ofori Attah said they dream of “a transformed Ghana that is prosperous enough to be beyond needing aid, and that engages competitively with the rest of the world through trade and investment.”

“This will require hard work, enterprise, creativity, and a consistent fight against corruption in public and private life. It will also require that we break from a mentality of dependency and adopt a confident can-do spirit, fuelled by love for our dear country, Ghana.”

The Ghanaian government has spent ¢14b spent on financial sector clean up

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