The National Communications Officer of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) Sammy Gyamfi, has disclosed that the party has more damning evidence of out-of-court interactions between the Attorney-General (A-G) and an accused person in a high-profile financial crimes trial.
A-G Godfred Dame and Richard Jakpa, the third accused person in the ambulance purchase trial were captured in an audio published earlier this week by the NDC, as evidence of the A-G’s unethical conduct.
The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) has defended the A-G, describing the NDC’s 16-minute audio as fake and pieced together.
Sammy Gyamfi insists that the NPP are taking Ghanaians for fools with their flip-flops on the tape.
Speaking on the Thursday, May 30, 2024 edition of Metro TV’s Good Morning Ghana programme, he gave details of the audio, which was a telephone call between the two persons (Dame and Japka).
He spoke about the date and time it was recorded while confirming that the recording was done by Jakpa.
Gyamfi also disclaimed the A-G spokesperson’s claim that Dame met Jakpa without his lawyer because at the time of the meeting, the accused did not have a substantive lawyer.
He gave the following new details about the tape:
a. It was recorded on April 9, 2024.
b. The call was placed by A-G Dame to Jakpa, hours before the accused was to appear in court.
c. The call was placed at 7:12 am and lasted for 26 minutes in total.
On the subject of Japka not having a lawyer when the two spoke, Gyamfi insisted that records available to him showed that Jakpa had retained the services of Thaddeus Sory at the time, drumming home the point that even if Dame had reached out over plea bargain issues, he was obliged to do so through a lawyer.
Meanwhile, Jakpa has applied to the Accra High Court demanding that the charges against him by the state be dismissed or the proceedings stayed citing the actions of the Attorney-General.
What Sammy Gyamfi said:
The A-G lied, it is just like someone who has stolen and you know have been caught but you don’t know the evidence against you so you start confessing your sins.
We told them we had evidence, so they knew it was going to be a tape, so they thought we were going to put out a tape in that Supreme Court judge’s house between Jakpa and the A-G, so they decided to preempt it.
So we decided that we will teach you sense, we will swerve you. We have that tape, that is why we deliberately didn’t put that one out, because we have many. They themselves contradicted the first lie, because they think we are all stupid.
We have done our press conference and given you evidence of a recorded phone conversation and this conversation was a call placed by the Attorney-General himself.
On 9th April, 2024, just recently, which call he placed to Mr. Jakpa at 7:12 am in the morning of the day Jakpa was supposed to go to court to testify. The same 9th April.
I have heard some say Jakpa didn’t have a lawyer, no, he had a lawyer on record, Thaddeus Sory. And yet he (A-G) called him for 26 minutes, it is that call that Jakpa recorded, when you saw that the conversation was going into the realm of criminality and that is what we have played.
