Deputy Chief of Staff Samuel Abu Jinapor has denied ever forcing or putting pressure on the CEO of Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital, Dr Felix Anyah, to give back a revenue-collection contract to uniBank after the same contract had been given to a wholly-foreign-owned bank, for which reason musician Kwame A-Plus has accused him and his colleague Francis Asenso-Boakye of corruption.
A-Plus’ allegation against the two presidential staffers was described as “baseless” and “without merit” by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) which probed the matter after it was referred to them by President Nana Akufo-Addo.
However, a leaked audiotape of a conversation between A-Plus and Deputy Chief of the CID ACP Maame Tiwaa Addo-Danquah point to a cover-up by the police.
Speaking on A-Plus’ claim that he (Jinapor) and his colleague deputy chief of staff were “very corrupt, arrogant fools” and “thieves whose level of stupidity is the same”, as far as the Korle-Bu matter is concerned, and as investigated by the CID, Mr Jinapor told Joy FM’s Kojo Yankson on Friday, 29 September that he never influenced the CEO of Korle-Bu to give the contract to uniBank.
According to him, their intervention did not go beyond a 1min: 30sec phone call he personally placed to Dr Anyah in which he barely broached the subject since his interlocutor was, at the time, busy at a function outside Accra.
The phone calle, he said, followed a protest letter written by uniBank to the management of Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital with regard to the cancellation of its existing revenue-collection contract, a copy of which was forwarded to the Flagstaff House by the bank.
According to him, uniBank was not happy about being sidelined in the process leading to the award of the contract and just wanted to be treated fairly.
He, therefore, denied ever influencing Korle-Bu to revert the contract to uniBank in exchange for financial favours.
“Well that would be totally untoward and that would be totally uncalled for and I will never never never never never do that. I’ll never do that. I’m not the best man of integrity in the world but my scruples are very really tight and I was brought up well and I will never do that and excuse my language, I’m not that stupid. I won’t do that. And it never happened and it couldn’t have happened.
Kojo Yankson: You weren’t offered anything?
“No. Well even at all, in terms of ‘you say offered’ and then you go and tell the CEO that give uniBank the contract and all that. First of all, there was no question about giving a contract, that’s number one. It was about a process which to lead to selecting a bank to collect revenue at Korle-Bu and a complaint was that the process was sole-sourced, if you want, and even if you interrogated uniBank’s account, it will even not fall within the bracket of sole-sourcing because in sole-sourcing you would still have to go to the procurement authority for permission and if it is restrictive tendering, you still … and I tend to have a bit of appreciation of these matters because I tend to deal with those matters at our office, so it had nothing to do with giving a contract to a particular bank. It had everything to do with process so you couldn’t even have gone to tell Korle-Bu that give uniBank a contract and the truth is that we don’t even need to split hairs about it, I mean I spoke to Dr Anyah for 1min:30secs, he won’t deny it, and we never went beyond ‘Oh this Korle-Bu contract’, and he said: ‘Oh hon. let me call you later and we talk about it …’, that’s it. Never.
“Both Mr Asenso-Boakye and myself are squeaky clean in this matter,” Mr Jinapor insisted.
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com
