Veteran journalist, Abdul Kweku Baako, has charged the state to go after former government officials implicated in the payment of an undeserving sum of â‚µ51.2m to a businessman as judgment settlement.

The Editor-in-chief of the New Crusading Guide newspaper, called a lack of action of these actors, the “missing link” in the Woyome judgement debt saga.

He made the call after another effort by the businessman Alfred Agbesi Woyome to stop the state from retrieving the money suffered in court.

An African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights in Tanzania on Friday, dismissed Woyome’s claim his fundamental human rights have been violated by his government.

The government has branded the latest judgment, “the end of the road” for Woyome who, has only refunded ₵4m. The state expects to sell his assets next week valued at about ₵20m while it targets more for auction.

Discussing the 10-year old saga on JoyFM’s news analysis show Newsfile, panellist, Kweku Baako said: “we haven’t finished”.

“It is time to interrogate the missing link,” he said and rehashed the story of the roles various government functionaries played in 2009.

The government has changed in January 2009 and a new John Atta Mills-led NDC administration was in power when the businessman filed a claim for judgement debt for the abrogation of financial engineering services with government.

It later emerged, he did not deserve the monies despite the contrary position held by no less functionaries such as Deputy Attorney-General, Barton-Oduro and Deputy Chief of Staff, Alex Segbefia.

Attorney-General, Betty Mould-Iddrisu, initially backed the payments but went back to court to protest it, arguing that she was under a mistaken belief that Woyome had a case against the state.

While these officials sat at the top of the machinery of government, there were other officials below facilitating the payments. The then Chief State Attorney, Mr Samuel Nerquaye-Tetteh, was charged with conspiracy and corrupting a public officer.

His wife, Mrs Gifty Nerquaye-Tetteh and the Director of the Legal Department of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, Mr Paul Asimenu were both charged with abetment of crime. 

All these charges were dropped after the state filed nolle prosequi in June 2012.

Alfred Woyome’s charges, conspiracy, defrauding by false pretence and corrupting a public officer, were also dropped. But he was re-arrested and re-arraigned on two counts of causing financial loss to the state and defrauding by false pretence.

In 2015, he was freed by an Accra High Court after Justice Ajet-Nasam said the prosecution failed to prove its case against the accused person.

The judge was baffled that key actors in the case including former Attorney-General and her deputy, Betty Mould-Iddrisu and Ebo Barton-Oduro respectively, were not invited to testify.

Four years since that judgement, calls for their prosecution have been revived following Woyome’s latest failure to stop the state from retrieving the debt.

Kweku Baako said the judgement debt saga is all about the failure of government officials to do due diligence. “It is as simple as that,” he said.

He said since Woyome has said several times that “he didn’t go to the government with a gun pointed to his head”, the state must be interested in the network of officials who made the payments possible.

A Supreme Court judge, Justice Jones Dotse called the saga “create, loot and share”, a description that went viral.