$45m Judgement Debt Looms

Ghanaians may be paying $45 million judgement debt sometime this year as a result of contractual disagreement between the National Lottery Authority (NLA) and SIMNET, an IT infrastructure company.

The two parties are locked up in a legal tussle over the disagreement and some of the faces behind SIMNET are people in key positions of the current administration, raising the issue of conflict of interest.

This comes on the heels of the payment of a debt of GH¢30 million for delayed payment of invoices with interest to SIMNET, ordered earlier by a court.

Included in this amount is another GH¢2 million paid to SIMNET as legal fee for its lawyers.

NLA had again been ordered by an Accra High Court to pay another judgement debt in a second lawsuit filed by SIMNET as damages caused by the NLA for engaging the services of a French company,Ingenico, to render the same services it had contracted SIMNET to deliver.

SIMNET was contracted to provide technical services initially to the Department of National Lotteries (DNL), which metamorphosed into the NLA among other things, to support the seamless delivery of processes required for marketing of lottery products.

The contract included the setting up of IT infrastructure with systems to sell lottery tickets, perform draws, procure terminals for the retailers and market the products introduced.

It was expected that the company would automate the draw and also import terminals for quick penetration of the market so as to minimise the impact of ‘banker to banker’ operations nationwide.

However, due to delays in the rollout of the terminals on the part of SIMNET, the NLA board of directors sometime in 2007 decided to implement the automation programme and imported 10,000 terminals for distribution to retailers, Ingenico of France, after winning the contract so as to shut down the manual system.

Meanwhile, SIMNET continued to provide the technical services to NLA under a new board appointed by late President Mills and chaired by Dr Scali Agbozo.

The matter has been in and out of court after audits by reputable auditing firms leading to a possibly huge judgement debt of $45 million.

Agbozo Speaks

However, speaking on Citi FM on Monday the former board chairman, Dr Agbozo, insisted that the SIMNET contract was not terminated.

He said when he took over in 2009, NLA was supposed to complete an automation of the lottery system with the aim of halting the lapses in the system.

He is quoted as having stated, “Before we got there, there had been various correspondences between NLA and SIMNET to bring more portable point of sale terminals for the lotto business,” adding that “NLA, before our tenure, had already gone to PPA to secure approval for the purchase of 2,000 points of sales terminals for the lotto business.”

Dr Agbozo said they later increased the number of terminals to 10,000 “because we needed to cover the whole country.”

“We actually corresponded with them [SIMNET] on several occasions to bring in more terminals and we informed them that we were ready to go and purchase terminals…we didn’t hear from them so we acted as such,” he claimed.

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When contacted, Mona Helen Quartey, a Deputy Minister of Finance in-charge of Revenue Agencies, including NLA, and who is believed to be chairperson of SIMNET, declined comments on the issue except to admit that she is the chairperson of SIMNET.

Currently, there seems to be disquiet in government circles with a case of conflict of interest being raised against the deputy minister.

Though he had earlier agreed on an interview with DAILY GUIDE, attempts for a one-on-one interview with Brigadier-General Ahiaglo, Director of NLA, failed.

As at press time, efforts to reach him or the head of legal department failed as several calls put through their respective mobile phones were not answered.

Source: Daily Guide