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.
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