Mr Ernest Thompson, the former Director General of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has served notice, he will file a submission of no case in the ongoing $15.3 million criminal trial against him and four others.
His counsel Abednego Tetteh, who held the brief of Mr Samuel Codjoe, told the High Court in Accra, presided over by Justice Anthony Henry Kwofie that the prosecution failed to establish a prima facie case against his client.
Consequently, Mr Tetteh has asked the court to give him ample time to file a submission of no case for Mr Thompson.
Counsel for the other accused also served notice to file similar submission of no case in favour of their clients.
The other accused were John Hagan Mensah, a former IT Manager at SSNIT, Juliet Hassana Kramer, the CEO of Perfect Business Systems (PBS), Caleb Kwaku Afaglo, a former Head of Management Information Systems (MIS) at SSNIT, and Peter Hayibor, the lawyer for SSNIT.
They all pleaded not guilty to willfully causing financial loss of more than $15.3m to the state.
The accused were arraigned since 2018 over the $66m SSNIT OBS project, which was meant to revamp the operations of SSNIT through Information and Communications Technology (ICT).
MrThompson and Kramer separately pleaded not guilty to three counts of contravening the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663), while Kramer and Afaglo also pleaded not guilty to defrauding by false pretense.
Afaglo is alleged to have secured his employment at SSNIT with fake certificates and was accordingly charged with various counts of possession of forged documents and authoring forged documents.
The case has been adjourned to October 10, 2024 for the parties to file submissions and responses.
It is the case of the prosecution that in June 2010, SSNIT initiated a $34m project to use ICT to revamp its operations to enable it to provide a state-of-the-art pension administration system in the country.
The prosecution said the objective of the project was to automate all of SSNIT’s core processes in the administration of pension and “integrate all internal systems, as well as external stakeholders of SSNIT.”
The contract sum, the A-G argued, ballooned from $34m to over $66m, although the system failed to perform efficiently as the project contract had envisaged.
“The so-called variations or change orders were carried out at the instance of A1 (Thompson), A2 (Mensah), A3 (Kramer) and A4 (Afaglo), and authorised by A1 (Thompson) even though some of the payments were above his threshold as Director-General and contrary to the Public Procurement Act,” the prosecution said.
The prosecution further said the system failed to work, but Thompson continued to pay for its related expenses.
BY MALIK SULLEMANA