The former Minister of Energy, Boakye Agyarko, has narrated the supposed events that led to his sacking in 2020.
Speaking in an interview with Kumasi-based Asanteman FM, Agyarko said that he was forced to vacate his position because of the re-negotiation of the 250 megawatt Ameri Power deal.
According to him, some leading figures in the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo government were not happy with a renegotiated deal that was less costly than the deal under the John Dramani Mahama government.
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) presidential hopeful, narrated how NPP stalwart, Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, re-negotiated the Ameri deal without the consent of the 18-member committee set up by the cabinet to work on the deal, which was headed by lawyer Philip Addison.
The former energy minister said that when he spoke to President Akufo-Addo on the matter, the president asked him whether there was something wrong with what Gabby did.
Boakye Agyarko said that he told the president that “the authority to renegotiate the terms of the Ameri Power Plant doesn’t lie in the hands of Gabby and that the proposal the firm he contracted made had violated all the Cabinet instructions and extended the contract to 20 years.”
Agyarko added that Akufo-Addo agreed with his reasoning but went ahead and asked him to forward the deal Gabby had negotiated to the committee that was set up to renegotiate the deal.
He said that after forwarding Gabby’s proposal to Philip Addison, he (Addison) was so angry about what had transpired and the committee went on with its work.
Agyarko said that the former Minister for Works and Housing, Samuel Atta Akyea, threatened that he would mobilise Members of Parliament (MP) against him should he present the deal that was worked on by the committee to the house.
The former energy minister said that when he took the report of the committee to Parliament, the then Speaker, Aaron Mike Oquaye, told him that the house was against the proposal in the report and that his best bet was to get the deal through an executive instrument.
He said that the president had travelled, so he approached the Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia for his signature for the executive instrument.
But to his surprise, the document came back with the signature of the executive secretary to the president, Nana Bediatuo Asante.
He said that when he went to meet one of the select committees of parliament on the deal, the members of the committee, including the former Chairman of the Finance Committee, Dr Mark Assibey-Yeboah, attacked him viciously.
He said that the committee did not give him one opportunity to explain himself because a “gang” had already gone to tell them that the new Ameri deal was worse than that of the Mahama government which was a lie.
“This was what transpired. Manasseh Azure and Gabby had already written on social media that I should be sacked even before this happened.
“The committee which I was not part of went to work to negotiate a deal, there was no contract signed, nothing had been paid but people were calling for my head, what was I supposed to do,” he concluded in the Twi dialect.
ghanaweb.com
