The Parliament of Ghana has advised the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC) to stay away from activities outside its core mandate of matters relating to oil exploration.
The nation’s legislature specifically pointed to sponsoring the Black Stars and handing out funds to certain state entities.
The House’s recommendations followed discussions on Thursday concerning the report from the Public Accounts Committee on how GNPC managed revenues from ventures into oil exploration in 2015.
The report was presented by the chairman of the Finance Committee of Parliament, Hon. Kweku Kwarteng, MP for Obuasi West.
“Mr. Speaker, this (report) is for the year 2015 and GNPC got into the business of being a bank lending money to TOR, BOST and giving money to the Black Stars. The question we need to ask is whether GNPC is a bank. Since when did its mandate include lending money to state institutions? We need to take this matter very seriously,” said a very concerned Member of Parliament for Old Tafo, Dr. Anthony Akoto Osei.
He went on: “We know what happened with the Black Stars (in 2014) and it was very embarrassing to the government. We know that this is not their core mandate and it needs to focus on that.
Going forward, we need to make sure that GNPC stops this bad habit of being a bank.”
It is not clear what the next line of action will be from Parliament or GNPC but earlier in July, GNPC released an amount of USD 1,500, 000 to the Sports Ministry for sports development and this was confirmed by the Deputy Sports Minister, Puis Hadzide in an interview with Citi Sports.
The Minister went on to state that part of the finances given by GNPC would go into helping to pay the salaries of the Black Stars technical team headed by James Kwesi Appiah.
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