The Bureau of National Investigations (BNI) is holding four operators Microfinance Company in the Brong Ahafo Region where customers’ monies have been locked up for months.

The companies which had repordtedly held their customers’ deposits ‘hostage’ for several months due to their closure by the Bank of Ghana, were DKM Diamond Microfinance, God is Love Fun Club, Jastar Motors and Investments Company Limited, Little Drops Association, Care for Humanity and Eye Adom 'Fun Club.

The BNI subsequently moved in and arrested four operators of some of the dis­tressed microfinance com­panies.

The arrested people were Martin Delle, Managing Director of DKM Financial Services; Noel Nortey, Nkoranza Branch Manager of God Is Love Fun Club; Charles Asum, Managing Director of Jastar Group of Compa­nies and Monica Afriyie popularly called Maame Korkor, Managing Director of God Is Love.

With the exception of DKM boss Martin Delle, who turned himself in yes­terday after hearing that he was on the run, the other three have already been put before court.

They were said to have collected various sums of money running into several millions of Ghana Cedis from their clients, promising them tantalising interests of not less than 50 per cent.

About fifty persons were said to have commit­ted suicide in the Brong Ahafo Region after several months and weeks of failed efforts to retrieve their monies unduly locked up with the collapsed microfi­nance companies.

Street protests had been the order of the day in the Brong Ahafo Region, with angry customers demand­ing payments of their locked up investments.

According to them, they could not make ends meet or pay their children's fees as their businesses had reportedly collapsed.

The development has widely been criticised as failure on the part of the Central Bank to prudently regulate activities of some dubious elements within the financial sector, hence the locking up of funds belonging to several indi­viduals.

The government was said to have waded into the logjam by ordering the arrest of the operators to find a way out of the finan­cial crisis.

Last Wednesday, about 1,800 aggrieved customers of some of the collapsed microfinance companies took to the streets in Berekum, threatening to close down traditional banks and the Berekum Municipal Assembly in two weeks if government did not prevail upon the institu­tions to pay back their monies.

The threats might have gingered the government into action against the oper­ators.