[ 2017-03-18 ]

Ayikoi Otoo

Missing Vehicles: 234 still unaccounted for - Ayikoi Otoo
The Chairman of the Executive Assets Sub-committee
of the Transition Team, Mr Ayikoi Otoo, says a
total of 234 vehicles still need to be accounted
for in the list of vehicles inherited from the
previous government by President Nana
Akufo-Addo’s administration.

He said out of a list of 707 vehicles that was
presented to his team from the office of
government machinery, the transition subcommittee
was able to trace 406.

67 unlisted vehicles retrieved

“We identified 67 vehicles not listed and
deducted that from the 301. There are 234 vehicles
which are yet to be accounted for,” Mr Otoo told
the media at the Flagstaff House in Accra
yesterday.

Recounting events regarding the submission of the
list of vehicles to the subcommittee, Mr Otoo said
they were initially given a list of vehicles by
the office of government machinery which had been
categorised into VVIP, Protocol and others.

He said the first time the list was given,
officials of the previous administration came back
and said that list was not accurate so they would
provide the committee with another list.

Two lists

He stated that they could not tell whether the
list was inclusive of such category of vehicles
that had been purchased under the arrangement, he
added. “Consequently, we were given another list
with the understanding that all those who bought
the vehicles had had their names taken off the
fresh list,” Mr Otoo said.

Most often, vehicle registration numbers were
called operational numbers and so it was possible
for one to be using a vehicle that was purchased
in 2017 but registered as 2014.

“So what you do is to examine the vehicles
against the chassis numbers and if they were
there, we then marked it as such,” he
explained.

Some of the ministers did not return their
vehicles with the excuse that they were working up
to the 6th of January after which they parked them
on the premises of their various ministries.

The members of the sub-committee, therefore, moved
to the ministries where a number of the vehicles
had been parked.

One other tip that helped the committee in easily
identifying state vehicles was the fact that
because government vehicles were usually not
insured, they bore no stickers.

Flashback

The Director of Communications at the Presidency,
Eugene Arhin, had indicated last January that the
government had detected that 208 cars remained
unaccounted for, which became a contentious issue
between officials of the former administration and
the current one.

The government had since set up a task force with
the mandate of retrieving state assets unlawfully
being held by individuals.

The statement announcing the “Task force on
Retrieval of State Assets” did not make direct
reference to officials of the immediate past
National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration.
  The agencies represented on this task force are
the Ghana Police Service, the Ghana Revenue
Authority (Customs Division) the Bureau of
National Investigations (BNI), the Driver and
Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), and the office
of the President.

Source - Graphic.com.gh

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