A Chartered Accountant with the KPMG, giving evidence in the case in which the founder of the defunct Beige Bank is standing trial, has been accused of refusing to show pages of documents to “mislead the court” in the ongoing trial.
This came to light when Julius Ayivor, the first prosecutor’s witness was being cross-examined by the defence lawyer to test the veracity of his testimony after giving evidence in the ongoing Beige Bank case.
Under further questioning from Lawyer Thaddeus Sory, counsel for Michael Nyineku, the CEO of Beige Bank, the witness was accused of leaving out pages in his exhibits to mislead the court.
“It was the case of counsel that Exhibit H 22 of the witness’s witness statement have just 7 pages, and you’ve exhibited in your witness statement several other statements to BCAM containing more than 7 pages. You refused to show us the other 6 pages in other to mislead the court,” the council put it to the witness.
However, the witness in his response disagreed saying “Exhibit H 22, was just one page and as I earlier explained, BCAM’s Bank Account statement is so huge that we only decided to extract portions that were relevant to the matters under discussion.”
Julius Ayivor added saying, “When we were asked to provide the entire listing of BCAMS statements, we did provide that. So, any transaction that is not on this Ex H 22, will be contained in the extra information that we provided”
Shown Exhibit H22, counsel said, the suggestion that the BCAMS account goes into several pages which is the reason why the witness did not show the other six pages was incorrect
But the witness in his answer said that “is not true,” adding that “I can demonstrate; the BCAM account in question is numbered 10,1003431365. Exhibit H21 has underneath it page 1 of 7, when you look at Exhibit H16, numbered 1000348635, you’ll note that within that statement you’ll see page 1 of 13 and the transaction on that page related to only April 16, 2018, which means that the notion that BCAMs statement is only 7 pages cannot be correct.”
The witness added that because of the volume of transactions that is contained in BCAMs statement, “we only extracted from the banking software portions that were relevant to the customers in question.”
“You’ll also note from my witness statement, the number of customers whose fixed deposits were moved to BCAM were in excess of 10k customers, what this means on the bank account statement of BCAM 100003481365 is that you’ll have transactions that will be 10k and over. Adding that together with other transactions from the banking software will be very difficult. So, to ensure you get the information you require, the reasonable thing we did was to extract portions of BCAM statement as it was relevant to the examples that I cited in my witness statement.”
Julius Ayivor
The hearing continues on Friday, February 17, 2023.
Brief facts
Per the brief facts narrated by Alfred Tuah-Yeboah, Deputy Attorney General, Mr Nyinaku was the former Chief Executive Officer of the Beige Bank, and on August 1, 2018, the Bank of Ghana (BoG) revoked the banking license of Beige Bank and placed it in receivership.
The Deputy Attorney General noted that a review of the financial and other records of the Bank conducted by the receiver and his team showed several suspicious and unusual transactions, which were subsequently reported to law enforcement agencies for investigation.
The AG said investigations conducted revealed that between 2015 and 2018, the accused person as CEO of the Bank had allegedly used various means to transfer huge sums of monies to companies related to him and for his personal benefits.
The AG alleged the funds transferred were depositors’ funds lodged with the Beige Bank and that between 2017 and 2018, Nyinaku had caused the transfer from 10,071.00 fixed deposit accounts held with Beige Bank in which various customers placed a total of GHC448,636,210.21 to Beige Capital Asset Management Limited, (BCAM), without the knowledge and consent of the customers.
The former Chief Executive Officer of Beige Bank Limited is being tried for an alleged GH¢1.2 billion theft and has pleaded not guilty.
The accused has since been granted bail to the sum of GHc200 million with three sureties with two of the sureties the court said should be justified with landed property equivalent to the bail bond and the assets should be valued by the Architectural and Engineering Services Limited (AESL) or Land Valuation Division of the Lands Commission.
He was to deposit his passport with the Court’s registry and report every Monday and Friday at 0900 hours to the investigator in the case.
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