The Registrar-General, Jemima Oware, has cautioned prospective clients of the Registrar General’s Department to be wary of the activities of middlemen and to avoid their services.

 She said the Department had put in place measures to control activities of the middlemen, who allegedly collected monies from prospective applicants in the pretext of helping them to register their companies.

However, it was up to clients to stay watchful and avoid their services, saying prospective clients who transacted businesses with middlemen did so at their own risk.

“Prospective clients should be watchful and avoid services of middlemen in their interest,” Mrs Oware told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in an interview in Sunyani after the inauguration of the Bono Regional Office of the Registrar-General’s Department on Monday.

The office would undertake registration of companies, industrial properties and marriages.

Mrs Oware stressed the department’s determination to decentralise its operations to make services accessible to clients saying decentralised offices would be opened in all the 16 regions in the country soon.

Currently, there are four regional offices in Kumasi, Takoradi, Sunyani and Accra.

According to her, the department had given a grace period for companies to file their annual returns by December this year because of the Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) and warned penalties would be imposed on those who failed to do so.

The Sunyani Municipal Chief Executive, Madam Justina Owusu-Banahene, said that decentralizing the department’s operations at the regional level was laudable, and expressed the hope that the activities of middlemen would be brought under control.