The Attorney-General and Minister for Justice, Dominic Ayine, has rejected allegations that his office is cutting deals with individuals under investigation under the Operation Recover All Loot (ORAL) initiative.
Mr Ayine said claims of plea bargaining or backdoor arrangements are false, insisting that all cases submitted to his office are being handled strictly in line with the law.
He gave the assurance while briefing the Vice President, Prof. Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang during her working visit to the Ministry of Justice.
Addressing concerns that have emerged in the public space, the Attorney-General said accusations that his office is compromising ORAL cases are unfounded.
“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 said that no case file submitted to his office has been tampered 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 disclosed that 16 dockets are currently under review and said his office is subjecting them to detailed scrutiny before proceeding. According to him, where investigations are found to be weak, his department does not hesitate to request 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 used the opportunity to reassure the public of the government’s commitment to accountability.
“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 the ORAL initiative, Mr Ayine raised concern about what he described as a growing wave of land compensation cases being brought against the state.
He warned that the scale of the claims poses a serious financial risk to the country.
“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 revealed that some claims run as high as 500 million Ghana cedis. According to him, many claimants rely on historical documents to argue that compensation was not paid during the colonial era.
“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 cases often succeed even at the Supreme Court.
Mr Ayine said preliminary estimates suggest the claims could amount to 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 noted, describing the situation as deeply worrying.
He disclosed that he has instructed the Solicitor-General to prepare a detailed brief for the President on the issue.
“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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