I warned SEC about Menzgold in 2014 – NPP MP

The Member of Parliament (MP) for the Gomoa West constituency in the Central region, Alexander K. K. Abban, has revealed he warned the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about the operations of now embattled gold dealership company, Menzgold, as far back as 2014 when he was lawyer for the Ghana Stock Exchange.

According to the MP who spoke to Winton Amoah on 3FM’s Morning Show, Sunrise, he had asked the then lawyer of SEC, whom he called Callis Badu, that the business model of Menzgold required the SEC’s regulation.

“I spoke to the lawyer for Securities and Exchange Commission warning him that, look, from my learning and the way I look at the structure US Group of companies has put in place and the Menzgold thing had put in place, what they were doing was securities, so they should step in”, he claimed Wednesday morning.

The operations of Menzgold came to a halt following a directive from the SEC to close down.

According to SEC, evaluation of Menzgold’s documentation show the company did not have the licences to trade in gold, and that, its operations are in breach of Act 929 “as well as a threat to unsuspecting and uninformed investors”.

While a section of the public blames the regulatory authorities for delaying to take actions to avert the situation, some blame the investors whose investments are currently locked up for failing to do due diligence.

For Mr. Abban, even though SEC issued a statement somewhere around 2015 to caution Ghanaians about the operations of the company, it did not do much to avert the situation.

In his view, SEC, the Bank of Ghana (BoG), and the Registrar General all failed as regulators in handling the situation, hence its degeneration to the point where depositors have had to lose their investments.

He also noted that even though the depositors are now “vulnerable” at the turn of events, they allowed greed to take the best part of them and could not decipher the genuity of the investment offer.

Meanwhile, the depositors are still embarking on demonstrations to mount pressure on the government to intervene in the matter to help retrieve their monies with the latest being Tuesday’s demonstration in Kumasi.