Former Auditor-General and member of the Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) Committee, Daniel Yaw Domelevo, has expressed concern about how stolen state funds are able to move freely through the country’s financial institutions.
His comments were in relation to the Buffer Stock scandal, in which the former CEO of the National Food and Buffer Stock Company (NAFCO), Abdul-Wahab Hanan, and his wife are alleged to have diverted GH¢78.2 million meant for the School Feeding Programme between 2017 and 2024.
According to Mr. Domelevo, this and the other cases exposes weaknesses in the banking system that make it possible for such large sums to be transferred without detection.
Speaking on NewsFile on October 25, he said the development is deeply worrying.
“If you go to the bank today and you want 100,000, you remember the controls they put in place,” he noted.
“They want you to bring your Ghana card, validate and what not. They check them.”
He questioned how such strict systems could allow large-scale financial misconduct to pass through them.
“So when you hear these amounts are going through the same banks, it means the fraudsters are also in the bank, or the banks are also polluted,” he stated.
Mr. Domelevo urged regulators and investigators to turn their attention to the banks themselves.
“We must have to go there and shake the banks because I can’t understand how some of these things can go through a financial institution which is not asleep,”
“So we may have to look at it,” he stressed.
