Why did the government take 5 months to freeze Menzgold's assets? – Lawyer asks

General News of Monday, April 29, 2019

Source: Myjoyonline.com

2019-04-29

It took the government 24 hours to freeze the accounts of the Ghana Football Federation after being involved in a corruption scandal.

But it would take the government five months to do the same thing after the investment firm Menzgold quickly became a ponzi scheme.

Avocat of the company's livid customers, Amanda Clinton, who pointed out two different responses, said she was convinced that the government's procrastination had caused hardship for her clients.

According to the company, this customer base has 60,000 people.

And since a directive from the Securities and Exchange Commission of September 2018 paralyzed the company and its mundane CEO Nana Appiah Mensah (NAM1), customers are using the courts to get their money back and use the streets to put pressure on the government.

Just in 2019, three protests took place in the last three months. It was obviously hoped that an edition of the May monthly exercise would begin soon.

Menzgold appeared on the radar of the Ghana Bank in October 2014. It was then Menzbank, a name to which the regulator objected because he did not have a license allowing him to to take deposits.

No problem. Menzbank was replaced by Menzbanc, but the Bank of Ghana still unhappy with the company's deposit operations forced it to change nomenclature. It's become Menzgold.

The company has asked potential customers to purchase gold from its sister company Brew Marketing Consult and deposit it with Menzgold for a monthly return of between 7% and 10%.

The return brought back customers with more investments. Some have sold homes, said Amanda Clinton. Others went for loans because the hype attracted all types of professionals.

Amanda Clinton said all these name changes were evasive techniques that are standard tactics used by suspicious stratagems.

She found it incredible that a simple question of whether Menzgold had legal badistance to collect deposits was allowed to expand until the company posed a serious threat to people's lives.

She added that even a first-year law student should know that Menzgold was illegally using deposits using Brew Consult as a "smoke screen".

The administrators of Menzgold were the same as Brew Consult, she said, a fact that should have forced the regulators to act much more decisively.

The human hunt for NAM1 and the hunt for money for deposits remain important issues to deal with.

NAM1 is in the United Arab Emirates involved in lawsuits while the government revealed that customers had unpaid investments of about 200 million cedis in Menzgold.

"But is the money blocked or has it been removed from the jurisdiction?" She said that the government had questions to answer to Ghanaians who needed to be informed.

What she knows is that the Bureau of Economic Crime and Organized Crime (EOCO) filed a criminal complaint on August 14, 2018, with the purpose of freezing Menzgold's badets.

"It took five months and a week before the bank accounts were frozen," she said, pointing to the delay by Menzgold and his directors with an unimportant opportunity to "do a lot" with the badets sought.

"It was cash they kept under Menzgold … It was not like a lot of money was kept in a bank. [Menzgold] it was like a bank, "she says.

It appeared on the hunt for Menzgold's badets that the company does not own its office buildings.

"The government has not done enough," said the lawyer, stressing in particular "we must act quickly", as did the government in the case of the Ghana Football Federation.

"What happened to all this money?", She charged the government, especially the prosecution.

For more news, go to myjoyonline.com

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