The Court of Appeal set aside all 78 convictions against former MASLOC Chief Executive Officer Sedina Christine Tamakloe Attionu on July 30, 2026, in a judgment running to 124 numbered paragraphs.

1. A ten-year-old letter nobody could authenticate

The single largest theft count against Tamakloe was GH¢500,000 that Obaatanpa Microfinance Company said it had refunded to her in cash in August 2014.

The prosecution's proof was a letter, Exhibit A, apparently signed by Ms Tamakloe, acknowledging she had received the money.

The three-judge panel went through the charges count by count, examining what evidence the prosecution had presented at trial and what the law required of it.

Ms Tamakloe, in her 2017 police statement, said she "cannot vouch that the letter was signed by me", even though the signature looked like hers.

Here is what the Court found.

That denial should have obliged the prosecution to prove the letter was genuine. Instead, the trial judge required Ms Tamakloe to explain whether the signature was hers.

The Court of Appeal found that backwards. It also found the letter was never properly authenticated under the Evidence Act's rules for official documents — no MASLOC official who compared it to an original testified, and no certified copy was produced.

Worse for the prosecution's case, MASLOC's own correspondence undercut the theft claim: the Court noted that MASLOC kept demanding interest payments on the GH¢500,000 investment for years after the refund was supposedly pocketed, with no internal letter ever acknowledging a cash refund had come in and gone missing. On that evidence, the Court held it was not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Tamakloe ever received the money.

2. The "phantom" sensitisation programme — that nobody checked Tamakloe was accused of stealing over GH¢2 million meant for a nationwide programme informing MASLOC loan beneficiaries about their obligations. The prosecution's case was that the programme never happened.

But the Economic and Organised Crime Office investigator who testified admitted, under cross-examination, that EOCO never contacted a single one of the 85,300 listed beneficiaries to check. The claim that no programme occurred came instead from MASLOC's Regional Directors, who told this to EOCO's investigators and to a private auditor, but were never called to give evidence in court themselves. Under Ghana's Evidence Act, a witness repeating what someone else told them to prove that thing is true is hearsay — and it is not admissible unless the person who actually said it either testifies or is shown to be unavailable. Neither happened here.

The Court also noted something the prosecution's own case file left out: several MASLOC staff who had cashed cheques and handed the money to Tamakloe for the programme were interviewed by investigators, and none of them said the programme had not happened.

• A disaster relief fund — and the prosecution's own witness contradicted the theft claim

Tamakloe was also charged with stealing GH¢579,800 from a fund meant for victims of the 2015 Kantamanto market fire. Here, the Court of Appeal found something unusual: under cross-examination, the prosecution's own lead witness — the MASLOC CEO who succeeded Tamakloe — testified that he had personally inquired and concluded the money had, in fact, reached the fire victims through the intended channel. That admission was never included in the official investigation report tendered in court.

If the state's own witness confirmed the funds were used for their intended purpose, the Court held, the theft charge could not stand.

• Charges that didn't say what she actually did

Beyond the individual evidence gaps, the Court found a batch of charges — those alleging Tamakloe "wilfully caused financial loss to the state" and "caused loss to public property" — were defective on their face. Ghana's Constitution requires that an accused person be told, in detail, the nature of the offence charged. These particular charges simply repeated the legal conclusion (that a loss occurred) without describing any specific act or decision by Tamakloe that supposedly caused it. The Court held this was not a fixable technicality; it was a failure to give her a case to answer at all, and convictions built on those counts could not stand regardless of what evidence followed.

5. Payments approved by finance officials — after they checked the paperwork

On the ex gratia and leave payments to herself and her deputy, the Court leaned on evidence from MASLOC's own Head of Finance, who testified he personally reviewed and authorised those payments because he found nothing wrong with the supporting documents. The prosecution had no evidence that Tamakloe deceived him or supplied false paperwork. Similarly, on the disputed vehicle procurement contract with Mac Autos, the Court noted that the Finance Ministry had confirmed the financing arrangement to the Public Procurement Authority, and that her successor as CEO went on to renegotiate and pay out the same contract — hard to reconcile with a claim that it was improperly procured from the outset.

What this means for the remaining charges

Because the theft and financial-loss convictions fell for lack of proof, the money laundering charges — which legally depend on there being an underlying theft — collapsed with them. And because every conviction was quashed, the Court declined to consider whether her original ten-year sentence was too harsh, holding that there was no valid conviction left to sentence her for.

In his concluding remarks, Justice Ankamah wrote that the rule requiring the prosecution to prove guilt, and barring that burden from shifting to the accused, "is not a technical nicety of procedure. It is the constitutional expression of the presumption of innocence, and it is owed to every accused."