The under-fire former Minister for Sanitation and Water Resources, Cecilia Abena Dapaah, appears to be purging herself of “false” narrations about the ongoing saga.
She is not taking false reportage about the matter lightly and has since threatened to sue, in a decision contained in a letter to multimedia, through her Solicitors.
In the letter dated Friday, August 11, 2023 and sighted by The Chronicle, the Solicitors, Sam Okudzeto and Associates, claimed the media house, JoyNews, had published “untrue and misleading” information about Cecilia Dapaah.
As such, the letter is demanding a retraction and apology in three days, “failing which we have our client’s firm instructions to institute legal action and bring the full force of the law to bear on your outfit for the damage and injury your reportage has caused and keeps causing.”
According to the letter, signed by Victoria Barth and copied to the client, in reference to an application filed by the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) on freezing the bank accounts of their client, the media outlet published information about amounts contained in those bank accounts, though that was not specifically disclosed by the investigative body.
The client is livid because the media house repeated the publication even after the OSP had dispelled the claims, ascribing the source of the information to “nameless, unidentified and unverifiable sources.”
The letter, addressed to the Chief Executive Office of the Multimedia Group Limited, Kwesi Twum, gave the chronology of the publications and insisted the amounts mentioned were false, but it did not give the right figures.
“From the foregoing, it is evident that your outfit’s consistent reportage of our client’s matter has been steeped in the purported reliance on information from unidentified sources and a reckless disregard for truth and accuracy.
“The figures you have been publishing about the sums in our client’s bank accounts are false and you have continued to push these falsehoods that you attribute to unidentified and unverified sources,” the strongly worded letter said.
The lawyers insinuated that the publications were motivated by “malice and a deliberate or reckless attempt to impute wrongdoing to our client,” throwing to the wind the constitutional principle of innocence until proven guilty.
The lawyers boldly demanded a retraction and apology to Cecilia Dapaah in three days from the day of delivery of the letter or face the full rigors of the law.
ACCOUNT FREEZE
The OSP is in court for legal backing for the freezing of the Prudential and Societte General bank accounts of Cecilia Dapaah, who is under investigation for alleged corruption and corruption-related offences.
In the application to be moved by an Accra High Court on Thursday, August 17, 2023 the OSP attached the letters written to both banks as exhibits.
In the application, the OSP argued that the court’s approval to continue to freeze those bank accounts would enable it to continue its probe.
