The Executive Director of the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) says Ghana is increasingly gaining a bad reputation for the integrity of international contracts it enters into.

Prof. Henry Kwasi Prempeh citing the recent allegations of bribery levelled against Asante Berko, the former Managing Director of the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) and the Airbus scandal, said it appears Ghana’s efforts to clean up the problem which has put it in a bad light has been unsuccessful and more needs to be done.

“Our international reputation for the integrity of the international contracts that we enter into has been at stake for some time. We have had problems with judgement debts and it has not even stopped. We went through a process of trying to clean up that problem…all of which are rising from international contracts...I do not know what came out of that effort from the past.

“We have now added a reputation for corruption to our already sullen reputation for not keeping our word when it comes to international contracts. So the country’s reputation and brand is at stake and we ought to take this seriously,” he said on JoyNews’ Newsfile programme.

The Managing Director of TOR, Asante Berko has been charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for orchestrating a bribery scheme and arranging for $2.5 million in bribes to be paid to officials of the government of Ghana and Members of Parliament between 2015 and 2016.

The payments were allegedly made to gain approval for a client’s power plant project, court documents from New York said. Mr Berko who is a former banker at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has denied the allegations and resigned as TOR MD.

Not long before this allegations, however, Ghana was named among one of five countries in which European aviation giant, Airbus, paid or attempted to pay millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for contracts, leading a court in Britain to slap a fine of £3 billion on the company.

In court documents and hearings, Airbus admitted five counts of failing to prevent bribery, using a network of secret agents to pay large-scale backhanders to officials in foreign countries, including Ghana, to land high-value contracts.

Prof. Prempeh finds these development and the many judgement debt issues in the past as worrying.

But he believes these issues keep cropping up because the framework set up to deal with international contracts is broken.

He said, “the four-point areas where monies tend to pass these processes are usually led by political actors going out to make the deal, sometimes even bringing in the third party. When the deal comes, going to negotiate the contract itself are led by political actors.

“Then after that has been done, the approval of the transaction by Parliament is of course a political forum and then of course tax waivers…same process.

"So we have actually turned the entire contracting process from the front end to the back over to political actors to lead which of course exposes them to these kinds of corruption influences,” he continued.

Parliament’s oversight responsibility which should have injected some integrity into some of these contracts, in Prof Prempeh’s view has also been lost.

In order to adequately deal with these issues, he proposed the establishment of an independent review panel to peruse all international contracts and render opinions on them for the benefit of the political actors before decisions are made.

“It is clear to me that we really need to step back and look at this process we have given ourselves, it is not working and is exposing the whole process to huge corruption risks and rigging and it is costing the country inordinate amounts of money that we do not want to waste

“It is not going to be solved by moving people around or changing governments,” he stressed.