A five-member panel of the Supreme Court awarded an amount of GH¢14,689 judgment debt claim to NDK Financial Service instead of GH¢1.2 billion it made against the state.
The court presided over by Justice Kwesi Anin Yeboah in a unanimous decision took the decision after hearing from both parties.
The panel, Justice Jones Dotse, Justice Paul Baffoe-Bonnie, Justice Nene Amegatcher, and Justice Sule Gbedegbe (retired) said the state should pay interest at the prevailing rate from November 28, 2014, to the date of payment to NDK.
Background
PricewaterhouseCoopers Ghana (PwC), the international accounting firm, which has been ordered by the court to ascertain the veracity of the claims of NDK Financial Services Limited against the government through the Ministry of Energy, at the apex court's last hearing in May 2019, could not submit its findings to the Supreme Court.
READ MORE: BoG collapsing Heritage bank senseless - Concerned Northern youth
PwC is expected to verify how much the state has been able to pay through the Bank of Ghana (BoG) and whether NDK is still entitled to more payments amounting to some GH¢1,273,000,000 as judgment debt.
The Supreme Court's order follows an application by the AG insisting that the state had fulfilled all financial obligations to NDK with regard to certain payments and interests based on the court’s order.
The AG contended that as far as the government is concerned, it has already complied with the judgment of the Supreme Court, but NDK continues to make ‘unsubstantiated’ claims for more money.
The AG averred that "NDK, through a process of categorizing the judgment debt into ‘ascertained’ and ‘unascertained’ parts, has been persistently making claims for humongous sums from the applicant herein, albeit totally unjustified."
It said: "the court order in the view of the state implies that the sum of GH¢867,441.5 plus interest at the agreed rate of 6.5% per month calculated at the close of each day and payable at the end of every month from 1st April 2009 at the end of every month from 1st April 2009 till the date of final payment."
It averred that "payment of any sums made in contravention of the letters of undertaking cast a burden on the respondent to produce evidence of such payment in contravention of the letters of undertaking by the Ministry of Energy."
"That the respondent treats a certain sum of GH¢268,250.52 paid by the Ministry of Energy to Ahaman Enterprise without reference to the respondent in December 2008 as part of the “unascertained diverted amounts," the AG's application averred.