The Minority group in Parliament has discovered what appears to be a clever setup by the Finance Ministry to enable some faceless people to cream-off millions from the 2021 Budget after it has been passed.
Two Deputy Special Prosecutors have been allocated a whopping Ghc43million as their combined annual salary.
on Page 242 of the Budget Statement, the two Deputies Special Prosecutors are allocated Ghc43,473, 043 as their salary for 2021.
What this means is that, per the 2021 Budget, the two deputy Special Prosecutors will each be paid some Ghc1.79million a month.
The discovery was made by the Minority during an assessment of the Budget ahead of Appropriation.
So far, the government’s body language indicates that the figures were a mistake. However, they fit perfectly into the Ghc13.75 billion that the government quoted as the total budget amount for the year.
As Hon. Eric Opoku, MP for Asunafo South points out, if the Minority had not been vigilant, this supposedly misallocated amount would go through appropriation and received approval.
“It’s obvious the government will not pay the two Deputy Special Prosecutors this money, so what would it have done with it?” he asked rhetorically.
The Akufo-Addo government was recently caught lying about the amount it spent on the COVID-19 pandemic, claiming a whopping Ghc19billion was spent on the pandemic, only to be exposed by the 2020 budget that the government only spent Ghc1.7billion.
With Ken Ofori-Atta, Akufo-Addo’s scandal-prone Finance Minister known as a man with the habit of hiding budgetary surplus, including billions from Petroleum funds, it is believed that if the budget had been approved in its current form, the money supposedly mistakenly allocated to the two Deputy Special Prosecutors would have been creamed off.
