Ali Nansii Shaibu, a Programmer at the Information Communication Technology (ICT) at the Department of the Electricity Company of Ghana Headquarters (ECG) head office, has bundled with a bail condition in sum of GH¢4, 000, 000.00 by an Accra High Court.
The bail condition follows his not guilty plea to 20 different counts of stealing, conspiracy to commit a crime, stealing, and money laundering.
Shaibu is not standing accused alone but with nine others, which two of them are also employers of ECG – Grace Gardiner (A2), Chief Supervising Cashier, and Anthony D.K. Quaye (A3), Technician at the Kasoa District Office of the ECG.
The others are Ibrahim Baba Adamu, Muntari Adamu Alfred Brown Gariba Awudu Misbaw, Kwasi Appiah Donkor, Eric Yaw Kyei, and Augustina Laniyan.
They are alleged to have stolen proceeds of the state owned enterprise to the tune of GH¢2,143,270.12.
The amount was allegedly stolen between August 18, 2016 and March 1, 2018, and discovered by the ECG through an investigation.
The nine others have also been granted bail in a sum of GH¢300.00 each with one surety to be justified.
The accused persons were arraigned on the charged before an Accra Criminal Court, presided over Justice Lydia Osei Marfo, on Thursday, March 30.
The particulars of the case, as read to the court by the prosecutor, Principal State Attorney (PSA) Dominic W. Bakoma, are that the complainant is a District Manager of the ECG in the Volta Region.
According to the prosecutor, Ali Nani Shaibu was in charge of Monitoring and Over-seeing the operations of the e-cash prepaid metering system, as well as the office intermediary with the Ghana Electrometer Company, with the responsibility of resolving ICT-related challenges in the power distribution system in the country.
He said, Ibrahim Baba Adumu was a Technician at Electrometer Company Limited, while the others were all private vendors who sold J-CG pre-paid power credit to the public.
According to him, in 2003, the ECG entered into a partnership agreement with various companies, including Electrometer, to provide pre-paid power distribution to customers across the country, and the private dealers were to sell credits as well.
Therefore, Ali Nansii Shaibu travelled to Hohoe in 2016 to resolve a pre-paid connectivity challenge for Gariba Awudu Misbaw.
The two agreed that the software would be manipulated to enable pre-paid credits to be sent to Gariba without the knowledge of the Hohoe District Office of the ECG.
Gariba would then delete the transaction and share the proceeds among themselves.
Mr. Shaibu equally entered into the same deal with the other accused persons, resulting in the theft of GH¢1,203,249.26 worth of credits.
Another set of transactions with other accused persons resulted in various amounts being stolen.
The prosecution said investigations put the total value of stolen credits under this scheme at GH¢2,143,270.15.
The accused person were alleged to have admitted to the offence and refunded an amount of GH¢282,600.
The next hearing is scheduled for April 27, 2023.
