A former Head of Information and Public Affairs at the Ghana Embassy in Washington DC Kofi Tonto has revealed that the sacked local staff member, Fred Kwarteng once offered him a $10,000 bribe monthly to be silent.
According to Kofi Tonto, he personally investigated Fred Kwarteng because he had established his own company.
Speaking in an interview on Asempa FM on May 26, 2025, Kofi Tonto narrated, “He is a bad boy. I personally investigated him because he had established his own company. My checks revealed that he was at the embassy around 2015 and was regularized in 2017 as the Foreign Affairs minister indicated.
“His private company was outside the embassy offering mailing services demanding customers to pay extra fees illegally. The incident came to my attention, I took it up with the leadership and they authorised me to investigate him”, he added.
He continued, “After my investigations, he admitted to the illegality. He later engaged me in a conversation and told me that he had accomplices who held higher authority than I did and further went on to say I was wasting my time to investigate him”.
“He offered me money in exchange for me to stay silent and overlook what was happening. I’m talking about Fred Kwarteng. He told me bluntly that the report I had filed directed to the ambassador would not yield any results and will be thrown out.”
“… He offered me $10,000 every month to be silent but I rejected it. What shocked me even more was that he had gone as far as cloning the embassy’s official website, ghanaembassy.org, and creating a fake one, ghnaembassy.net with the help of some accomplices, who were civil servants. They were using the cloned site to collect extra fees from unsuspecting applicants. Only a fraction of that money ever made it into the embassy’s official accounts,” he added.
Tonto’s comment comes following Fred Kwarteng, a local staff at the Ghana embassy in Washington DC being exposed for diverting visa and passport fees into private accounts.
According to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Fred Kwarteng illegally diverted visa and passport applicants into his company Ghana Travel Consultants.
In a post on X, Ablakwa revealed, “The immediate dismissal of Mr. Fred Kwarteng. Mr Kwarteng was a local staff recruited on August 11, 2017 to work in the embassy’s IT department. According to findings and his own admission, he created an unauthorized link on the embassy’s website which diverted visa and passport applicants to his company, Ghana Travel Consultants (GTC) where he charged extra for multiple services on the blind side of the ministry and kept the entire proceeds in his private account.
His illegal extra charges which were not approved by the ministry and parliament as required under the Fees and Charges Act ranges from US$29.75 to US$60 per applicant. The Investigations reveal that he and his collaborators operated this illegal scheme for at least 5 years”.
Watch the video below:
