The judgment of the Court of Appeal acquitting and discharging Former MASLOC boss Sedina Tamakloe is out. It's 94 pages.

I advise you to read it and form an opinion. If you cannot do that immediately, here's a summary. This is just provided for information purposes and is not a substitute for judgment.

Sedina Tamakloe Attionu, as we all know, ran MASLOC from 2013 to 2017. When she left office, EOCO came knocking, and by 2019 she and her Operations Manager, Daniel Axim, faced 78 criminal counts touching almost every corner of the agency’s finances, a GH¢500,000 investment refund that was alleged to have vanished, sensitisation money that seemed to disappear into thin air, disaster relief funds for Kantamanto fire victims that appeared to have been diverted and not giving to the victims, a fleet of 350 vehicles bought allegedly at inflated prices, and cash she paid herself on her way out the door.

The High Court convicted her on all counts and sentenced her, but by then she had already left the jurisdiction and the trial had concluded in her absence. She appealed anyway, and the Court of Appeal had to work through the case almost from scratch. An appeal is by way of rehearing, so the Court of Appeal had to comb the record of proceedings to decide whether the STATE proved its case against Sedina Tamakloe beyond reasonable doubt.

The first question was whether she was even entitled to appeal at all, having absconded. The Republic said no; a fugitive shouldn’t get to challenge a conviction she ran from. But the Court found nothing in Ghanaian law that strips a person convicted in absentia of her right to appeal, and since her notice of appeal was properly and timeously filed, that objection went nowhere.

The next question was whether the charges themselves could even support a conviction. Here the case split cleanly in two. The stealing charges and the conspiracy-to-steal charges, the Court found, were properly drafted; they told her clearly enough what she was accused of doing, when, and with what money. But an entire category of charges, the ones accusing her of “willfully causing financial loss to the State” and “causing loss to public property”, turned out to be hollow shells.

Read them, and you find no actual description of what she supposedly did; they simply repeat, count after count, that she “agreed to act together with a common purpose to willfully cause financial loss to the State.” No act, no omission, nothing a person could actually defend against. The Constitution guarantees an accused the right to be told, in detail, the nature of the charge against her, and these charges failed that basic test. So before the evidence was even weighed, a large swathe of counts collapsed for being legally empty according to the court.

More than 30 counts were found to be incurably defective and struck out.

Now let's talk about the charges that the court found were properly filed and the decision thereon as to whether

Take the GH¢500,000 said to have been paid back to her in cash by Obaatanpa Microfinance. The story is that MASLOC gave a loan of 500,000 to Obaatanpa Microfinance but that Obaatanpa Microfinance allegedly returned the money to her because they found the interest accompanying the loan to be too high.

The only evidence tying her to it was a letter she supposedly signed acknowledging receipt, but in her police statement, Sedina Tamakloe had said she “cannot vouch that the letter was signed by me even though the signature looks like mine.”

Instead of asking whether the Prosecution had proved she wrote that letter, the trial judge asked whether she had disproved it. That is backwards, the Court of Appeal found.

The presumption of innocence doesn’t ask an accused to clear her name; it asks the State to establish guilt. The letter was never even properly authenticated as a MASLOC document. So the charge fell.

The story repeats with the sensitisation and monitoring money, over two million cedis meant to reach 85,300 people across the country. The Prosecution’s case that no such sensitisation programme ever happened rested entirely on what regional directors supposedly told two witnesses, directors who never appeared in court to be cross-examined.

That is hearsay, plain and simple, and it should never have carried the weight the trial judge gave it.

Worse, one of the Prosecution’s own investigators admitted under cross-examination that EOCO never even tried to contact a single one of the alleged beneficiaries to check whether they’d received anything at all.

The Kantamanto fire-relief money tells perhaps the most striking version of the same pattern. The Prosecution’s own first witness, the sitting CEO of MASLOC then, testified that MASLOC’s own inquiries had concluded the money had reached the fire victims as intended, and that this fact, for reasons never explained, simply never made it into the official report tendered at trial.

A prosecution witness effectively confirmed the defence’s case, and it was still treated as unproven for the accused to rebut.

Once the stealing charges fell, the money laundering charges, which depended entirely on stealing being the predicate crime, fell with them; there was no proceeds of crime to launder if no crime had been proved.

The remaining charges followed the same thread.

On the improper payment counts, the Head of Finance who actually processed and approved her leave and ex gratia payments testified that he saw nothing wrong with the documents when he signed off on them, hardly evidence that she orchestrated an improper payment.

On the unauthorised commitment charge over the GH¢61 million vehicle contract, and the Public Procurement Act charges over the same vehicles, the trial judge again reasoned that because the charge was framed as a negative, “without authorisation”, the burden shifted to her to prove she did have authorisation.

The Court of Appeal rejected that reasoning outright; the way a prosecutor chooses to word a charge cannot relocate the burden of proof, and unless a statute expressly says otherwise, the difficulty of proving a negative remains the Prosecution’s problem, not the accused’s to solve.

The evidence actually showed the Finance Ministry had confirmed the financing arrangements, and tellingly, her successor as CEO went on to honour and pay out the same contract, hard to reconcile with the idea that it was unlawful from the start.

In the end, all the charges fell, and the conviction and sentencing were set aside.