Former Minister of Defence, Dominic Nitiwul has told the Attorney-General Dr Dominic Ayine to allow the courts to determine whether the NDC officials and others who are standing rail in court are innocent of the charges or not.
For him, it is not a good example for the AG- to be withdrawing the cases from court.
“The appeal case of Richard Jakpa and Ato Forson was withdrawn by the president, allow the court to deal with the matter and let us see whether you have sinned or not, allow the court to decide whether the man is guilty or not,” the Bimbilla Lawmaker said in Parliament on Wednesday, February 12.
The Mahama administration has officially dropped all criminal charges against the former National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, and Anthony Kwaku Boahen.
Also, the Former Chief Executive of Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), Dr. Stephen Kwabena Opuni, businessman Seidu Agongo, and Agricult Ghana Limited have been acquitted and discharged of all criminal charges in the COCOBOD case by the High Court.
This was after the State Prosecutors, upon the instructions of the Attorney General, filed a notice of withdrawal on Tuesday, January 28, 2025, to drop all charges against them.
The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Dominic Akuritinga Ayine, has also withdrawn an appeal initiated by his predecessor, Godfred Yeboah Dame, against a Court of Appeal ruling that acquitted and discharged Ato Forson and Richard Jakpa of charges related to causing financial loss to the state.
In a Notice of Abandonment of Appeal dated January 23, 2025, Dr. Ayine stated that the state had decided not to pursue the matter any further.
“Please take notice that the Republic, having previously served notice of appeal against the judgment delivered by the Court of Appeal on July 30, 2024, hereby gives notice that it does not intend to prosecute the appeal further and abandons all proceedings related to this matter from the date of this notice,” he stated.
The Attorney-General also withdrew all charges against Johnson Asiama, the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana (BoG), concerning his alleged involvement in the collapse of UniBank and UT Bank.
Asiama, along with several others, had been facing a range of charges including fraudulent breach of trust, money laundering, conspiracy to commit crime, and violations of the Bank of Ghana (BoG) Act since 2020.
The government received flak fro this development.
But the Attorney-General Dr Dominic Ayine has explained the reasons for discontinuing the cases.
At a press conference in Accra on Wednesday, February 12, he said “My decision to terminate the criminal trials was animated in the main by three factors. The first was that for ethical and professional reasons, I could not in good conscience continue to prosecute some of the cases. The second was that, for some of the cases, my own review and analysis of the charges showed clearly that the charges were defective, and some were filed against the promptings of plain commonsense.
“The third reason was that, in some of the cases, the evidence led so far showed that there was reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the accused persons and no prosecutor should continue to pursue a case in the face of overwhelming doubt regarding the guilt of the accused. Also, it is important to highlight the fact that in most of the cases in which I have terminated proceedings, the conduct of some of the individual judges left much to be desired. I will deal with the issue of judicial conduct in my concluding remarks. Suffice it to say that it raises the specter of lack of fairness in criminal proceedings where a judge is seen to be overly hostile to the accused and unreservedly deferential to the prosecution.
“Now to my first substantive reason for dropping charges in some of the cases. As noted above, for purely ethical and professional reasons, I could not in good conscience continue to exercise my prosecutorial authority under article 88(3) in some of the cases. These cases were the Republic v. Cassiel Ato Forson & Another and Republic v. Ofosu Ampofo & Another.
“This is because I was deeply involved as counsel in these two cases. In the case of Republic v. Ato Forson, I was not counsel of record but my junior partner, Godwin Kudzo Tameklo was. As a team, we discussed our case strategy in chambers, and I was involved in reviewing legal arguments and in some instances authoring some of the arguments that we filed. I believed then and still believe now that the Honourable Ato Forson was the victim of a political witch-hunt and that he had no case to answer in that trial.
“That position was vindicated by the erudite judgment of the Court of Appeal which ruled that the trial court erred in calling upon the accused persons to mount their defence. When the then Attorney General vowed to file an appeal and actually went ahead to do so, I took the view that it was done to save face and that there was not a scintilla of merit to his appeal. Indeed, the appeal was, to say the least, incompetent. My involvement in the case of Republic v. Ofosu Ampofo & Another is a matter of public record. At the initial stages of the trial, I was on record as counsel with the venerable Tony Lithur and my former boss, the Honourable Marietta Brew. It was our position as a team that the charges against the Honourable Ofosu Ampofo were trumped up and motivated purely by politics. I still stand by that view.”
He added “Ethically, a prosecutor should and must have the courage of his convictions and must remain fearless to stand by those convictions even in the face of a severe storm of public criticism. Strident criticism should not be reason why a self-respecting prosecutor must abandon his professional convictions in favor of political praise.
“So, I am owning up to stand by the professional decision I took that in my current position as Attorney General, and the prosecutor for that matter, I was not going to suddenly recant my position and continue to prosecute the accused persons in the two cases. No new evidence has been presented to me upon assumption of office as Attorney General to cause me to abandon my professional convictions.”
Source:
3news.com
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