The Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Dominic Ayine, has dismissed claims that his office is striking deals with persons under investigation in connection with the Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) programme.
Mr. Ayine stressed that suggestions of plea bargaining or secret arrangements are untrue, emphasizing that every case referred to his office is being pursued strictly according to the law.
He gave this assurance while updating the Vice President, Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang, during her official visit to the Ministry of Justice.
Responding to public concerns, the Attorney-General maintained that allegations of his office undermining ORAL prosecutions are baseless.
“When it comes to ORAL, there are issues being raised about the fact that we are cutting deals in the ORAL cases. Your Excellency, ORAL is going very, very well. The prosecutions, which are being led by my deputy and the Director of Public Prosecutions, are going very, very well,” he said.
Mr. Ayine further clarified that no case file reaching his office has been interfered with. “I want to put it on record, and the National Intelligence Bureau will bear me out, that no docket has come here that has been compromised in any way,” he stated.
“No deal, no plea arrangement has been entered into with anybody who has committed an offence that comes within the ambit of the ORAL cases we have received from the NIB and are prosecuting.”
He revealed that 16 case files are currently under examination, noting that his office is subjecting them to thorough review before moving forward. Where investigations appear weak, he said, his department requests additional evidence.
“We will be putting those ones through the process of critical scrutiny, so that when we notice loopholes in the investigations, we will tell the investigative authorities to bring us more evidence, as we are doing now with the National Service prosecution,” he explained.
The Attorney-General also reassured the public of government’s commitment to transparency and justice.
“I want to assure the Ghanaian public, using this platform, that we have not entered into any plea negotiations with anybody that committed an offence that comes within the remit of ORAL. People are being held accountable, and they will be held accountable as far as the ORAL programme is concerned,” he said.
Beyond ORAL, Mr. Ayine expressed concern about what he described as a surge of land compensation suits against the state, warning that the magnitude of such claims poses a grave financial threat.
“There are a lot of land matters, especially land compensation, and those are becoming a big headache for me as Minister of Justice. There is a tsunami of land compensation cases hitting the courts against the Republic, and the figures are mind-blowing,” he said.
He disclosed that some claims amount to as much as 500 million Ghana cedis, with many plaintiffs relying on old records to argue that compensation was never paid during colonial times.
“They will go and dust documents from the archives and claim that the colonial government did not pay compensation for land, and then they take the government to court,” he said, adding that such suits often succeed even at the Supreme Court.
Preliminary assessments, he noted, suggest the claims could reach billions of Ghana cedis.
“The last time we did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, we were looking at billions of Ghana cedis in land compensation claims,” he remarked, describing the situation as alarming.
He added that he has tasked the Solicitor-General to prepare a comprehensive report for the President on the matter.
“I have directed the Solicitor-General to put together a brief for the President on the land compensation tsunami that we are having,” he said.
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