Lawyer, Nana Asante Bediatuo, says if the findings of the Judgement Debt Commission were meant to smear Nana Akufo-Addo, then they have failed spectacularly.

“If indeed this report about Akufo-Addo is to attack his incorruptibility, I think it is futile, and I think people should stop trying to do that. There is nothing in Akufo-Addo’s background, his profession to suggest corruption. They should just give up”, he said on Joy FM and MultiTV’s Newsfile news analysis programme on Saturday.

Asante Bediatuo was speaking on behalf of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) flagbearer on a Judgment Debt commission report that has accused him and the Kufuor Administration of causing financial loss in the sale of a Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) drillship to pay a judgment debt.

The ship was sold by the Kufuor administration to defray a 19.5 million dollar judgment debt owed Societe-General Bank in 2001 when Nana Akufo-Addo was then the Attorney General.

The commission report concludes that Nana Addo’s “miserable” failure to defend the state in a London court led to a judgment debt higher than what Ghana would have paid.

The report said, “this Commission holds the view that the payment of US$19.5 million instead of the US$14 million earlier on agreed, constituted financial loss to the Corporation and Ghana”.

Nana Asante Bediatuo’s take on the Commission’s findings is that it failed to prove Akufo-Addo’s complicity in the judgment debt.

“The Commission is an inquisitorial commission. It is not like our normal courts that employs the adversarial process. So the Commission has a higher burden of investigating and interrogating every issue that comes up and looking for evidence in support of one particular fact or another. I think that in this particular instance the Commission has failed in that endeavor”, he said.

 Asante-Bediatuo notes further that the Judgement Debt Commission’s failure to hear the former Attorney General during its sittings is another flaw in the Commission’s work that make its findings questionable.

When the matter about the drillship and related matters came up at the Commission's sittings, Nana Akufo-Addo wrote to the Commissioner, Justice Yaw Apau, indicating his willingness to appear before him and explain his side of the issue. He was not called.

The Commission nonetheless faulted him in its final report presented to the president.

“The denial of the right to be heard makes some bit of nonsense of the report”, he stressed.

Listen to Mr Asante-Bediatuo's full submissions on the programme in the attached audio.