The Receiver of collapsed microfinance, savings and loans and other financial institutions, Mr. Eric Nana Nipah has said a total of 330,000 depositors have so far received their funds since it began paying affected customers.

Mr Nipah said his office had so far made cash payments of GH¢2.13 billion to depositors, while the rest had been paid with bonds.

“As part of the scheme, we grouped depositors into various classifications. We had financial institutions, individual depositors, companies, social organisations such as schools, churches, hospitals and welfare organisations.

“With respect to individual depositors, we have paid 330,000 claims, and with those claims, 320,000 have been paid in full in cash and these claims were below the GH¢70,000 threshold,” he added.

This includes funds from the 347 defunct microfinance companies, 23 savings and loans and 39 micro-credit companies. According to Mr. Nipah, his outfit has recovered GH¢598 million out of the targeted combined assets worth GH¢2.9 billion.

The amount was recuperated from loan recoveries which amounted to GH¢44 million, placements and investments summing up to GH¢495 million, balances transferred from other banks amounting to GH¢50 million, sale of vehicles which accumulated to GH¢4 million and cash in the vault also summing up to GH¢5 million.

The receiver

While addressing the media at a press briefing in Accra, the Receiver, Mr Eric Nana Nipah, said his office had made low recoveries due to the poor quality of assets of some of the institutions, asset diversions and misstatement of a significant number of assets of some of those companies.

“Some of the institutions do not have records on their assets at all, and for some of them, we don’t even have records to validate depositor claims. Another reason is encumbered assets — the fact that some of the operators of the institutions used some of the assets as collateral and security to other institutions,” he said.

Report from Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO)

The Receiver has said that they will employ the services of the Economic and Organized Crime Office (EOCO) to help in the tracing of assets of the defunct finance institutions.

“We have involved EOCO in the tracing of assets and EOCO has done some good work in this area, where they have been able to trace some assets of these institutions. We forwarded the list of the top 10 institutions from whom we have received the highest claims from depositors to EOCO and asked it to do some investigations to trace the assets of those institutions.

“The intention is to recover all these assets and pay all creditors of the affected institutions. As we speak, we have initiated processes and started the phase two of sale of motor vehicles and landed properties of the institutions,” he noted.

The Claims received so far

Mr Nipah has also revealed that he has so far received claims from the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) to the tune of GH¢18 million, with claims from employees, including outstanding salaries and compensation due them, also amounting to GH¢131 million.

Additionally, he said his office has received claims from 490,000 depositors, amounting to GH¢8.5 billion.

“The government has given us GH¢6 billion, which is made up of GH¢2 billion cash and GH¢4 billion in bonds, so we have been paying depositors through the CBG.

“As part of the scheme that was designed, there was a time frame for depositors to submit their claims and so far we have received claims of GH¢8.18 billion from depositors only. Out of this amount, GH¢1.7 billion was submitted after the deadline,” he explained.

He further said the government made provision for GH¢6.44 billion, which was submitted within the deadline, and out of that amount, as part of the validation process, about GH¢390 million was knocked off against people’s loans.

On the part of rejected claims, Mr Nipah said his office has rejected claims amounting to GH¢380 million.

“Some people thought there was free money somewhere so they wanted to take advantage. Some had liquidated their investments but still presented their certificates for claims,” he said.

He added that another reason which accounted for the rejection was that part of the laws that governed the special deposit-taking institutions were not supposed to deal in the trading of foreign currencies, of which they did.

“Once it’s against the law, we rejected those claims and referred the matter to EOCO. The claims in this category were around GH¢70 million,” he noted.

Those rejections then brought the claims to be dealt with to GH¢5.6 billion, out of which GH¢5.3 billion had been validated, with the rest yet to be done due to the unavailability of records on some of the institutions, he said.

“There are 36 institutions on which we do not have records to be able to validate the claims. We cannot rely only on the claims submitted by the depositors and make payment,” he said.

He said his outfit had also forwarded such anomalies to EOCO to investigate.