An Economist and financial engineer Mr Alex Emmanuel Nti has said that the government should be blamed for the significant revenue losses because they brought the Domestic Dept Exchange Program DDEP.
Mr. Alex Emmanuel Nti in an interview with Ohene Kinnah on Plan B FMs late afternoon EBAANOSEN explained that the people are not investing in governments bonds and matured bonds too are not reinstated because of the current conditions,
“It is going to be a short-term effect but will have a long term effect due to the lost of confidence in the sector, the revenue losses will continue if the government does not take pragmatic steps to settle mature bondholders”.
Meanwhile, the Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr Ernest Addison has predicted that the yet-to-be-released BoG report will reveal a high revenue loss for the country.
According to him, the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP) is to be blamed for the significant loss.
Responding to questions posed by the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament, Dr. Addison disclosed that the delay in producing the report is partly due to a lot of work being done by the auditors to assess the level of impact of the DDEP.
“The reason being the domestic debt exchange that the government had to undertake. As you’re aware, most of the banks are lending to the government in various instruments”.
“So there has been a lot of work being done by the auditors in trying to assess the impact of the exchange. As we recently pointed out, we had to write to the Ministry of Finance to notify him of the delay,” he explained.
Dr. Addison stated that the DDEP ended recently with a cocoa bill and dollar-denominated bonds included.
This, he said required the central bank to ask for more time to properly examine the situation and put together a comprehensive statement.
“The domestic debt exchanges ended last week; the cocoa bill, the dollar-denominated bills – they were only settled last week. So all of these have an impact on the Bank of Ghana’s account.”
“But I can confirm that we will make a significant loss in 2022,” he added.
The Domestic Debt Exchange Programme was introduced in December 2022 as part of the conditions to reprofile Ghana’s growing debt stock. It was also a prerequisite exercise to secure an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout request of $3 billion.
Although the DDEP was met with severe opposition and disgruntlement by various stakeholder bodies, the government eventually succeeded in executing it.
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