Former Chairman of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), Professor Frimpong-Boateng has denied being complicit in the illegal mining trade.

According to him, such a claim has been disproven by the Centre for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) which conducted a four-year-long investigation into his involvement in the illegal mining trade and cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he said he and his son became persons of interest following the news of some 500 missing excavators.

“This was a subject of investigation by CHRAJ for four years. So from 2019 to March this year, I and my son were under investigation and the report is there we haven’t done anything wrong and so that is neither here nor there.

“Missing excavators everybody knows that I have not taken any excavator but the figure was put out there by a journalist. There was an interview he said when Amewu was leaving he left 500 excavators so somebody brought out that figure and then they tag it on you, you know, and it is not true,” he said.

Explaining the incident surrounding the alleged missing excavators, he said his team had been involved in immobilising the excavators as some of them could not have been transported from the bush where they were operating.

“We immobilised the excavators by removing the control board and so maybe a day or a night they’ll be able to remove about 15, 20 excavator control boards and report that they have removed the control boards. A few of them may be able to transport either to the police station or the district assembly where they are.

“But then when you leave, the owners of the excavators will bring other control boards, fix them in and then take them away. And so at some point, we were told that about 750 excavators had been impounded.

“So we took a team around …but when we went round and visited the mining areas, the district assemblies and the police stations, we saw just a little over 200 excavators and these were all carted to Accra because those days we did not have any load holder to carry the excavators because that is crucial when you want to transport the excavators. So that’s what happened.”