Dr Justice Srem Sai, the Deputy Attorney General has revealed that the majority of the suspects implicated in the fraud at the National Service Secretariat (NSS) are willing to return over ¢560 million loots.
According to the Deputy Attorney General, the state is open to retrieving the funds and using some of the suspects as witnesses in court.
Speaking on JOYNEWS, Dr Justice Srem Sai, “National Service is in different aspects. There’s an aspect of the projects that the National Service Secretariat undertakes.
They have farms where they acquire property, grow and sell produce. Then there is the issue of paying ghost National Service persons”, he added.
Dr Justice Srem Sai detailed, “We are talking about over GH¢560 million. That’s what we are looking at from the 22 individuals that investigators believe were responsible for, if you like, alleged loot,”
“There are more people, but you have to weigh the cost in terms of time and effort of bringing all these people to court, and the benefit you get of retrieving the money.”
“A lot of them only a few are not willing but a lot of them are willing to return the money,” he revealed.
He added, “Definitely, before we go to court, the number will not be 22. It will come down because we are still having conversations with these people”.
“After we charge them, some of them also have an opportunity to do what we call plea bargaining. To come and say, ‘Well, we are guilty. But instead of sending us to prison for this number of years, you can come down to this, and we return this amount of money.’”
“They give us the reasons why we should not go with them through the entire process. We want the money back”, he boldly stated.
President John Dramani Mahama’s order to the National Investigations Bureau (NIB) to investigate the NSS ‘ghost names’ scandal.
Over 81,885 suspected ghost names were on the payroll of the NSS following a head count of active National Service personnel at the behest of the Minister for Finance as a prerequisite for the clearance of allowance arrears dating back to August 2024.
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