A husband and wife team who are both Onango Ghana Limited shareholders have admitted to the police that they stole $650,000 from the business while in charge of all of its online IT systems.
The Ghana Revenue Authority was reportedly misinformed by Mr. Samuel Kwabena Opoku and his accomplice, Madam Juliana Sherri-Opoku, who claimed they needed more time to pay the taxes owing because the company had ceased operations.
After being accused of defrauding through false pretences and stealing, they made a claim they knew to be untrue.
Mr. Opoku entered a not guilty plea to the other charges against the two, which included conspiracy to commit a crime, forging official papers, and uttering false documents.
The Managing Director of the Company, Mr. Opoku, was granted bail in the amount of $10.5 million with one surety by the court presided over by Mr. Emmanuel Essandoh.
The court mandated that the surety must be a public employee making at least $3,000 per year.
Madam Sherri-Opoku, his accomplice, was not present in court, thus her plea was not accepted.
On July 4, 2022, he's anticipated to turn up again.
Charles Addo, the complainant, was a managing director of Meridian Management Investments Limited and the chairman of Onango Ghana Limited, according to the prosecutor, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) Emmanuel Nyamekye.
The accusers, according to the prosecution, are both directors and shareholders of Onango and have dual citizenship with Ghana and the United Kingdom.
They were the company's managing director and executive director, who oversaw the department of finance, respectively.
Onango Ghana Limited was introduced to them by Lendable Asset Management LLC, a financial institution incorporated in the United States, in 2018, and they were asked to invest in and lend money to the said Company. According to Mr. Nyamekye, the accused persons first approached the complainant in the year 2017.
According to the prosecution, the defendants provided Lendable Asset Management LLC with financial statements and computerised dashboards that they claimed showed the company's customers and financial position in an online virtual account (OVA) that they claimed was held with MTN mobile money services.
According to Mr. Nyamekye, the dashboard contained fabricated information about the company's clients and balances to persuade Lendable Asset Management LLC and Meridian Management and Investment Limited to make investments and loans.
According to the prosecution, Onango Ghana Limited's dashboard showed fictitious transactions, fictitious client counts, and fictitious account balances.
Meridian Management Investment Limited, operating via the complaint and Lendable Asset Management LLC, was enticed by this information to invest and loan a total of $13.2 million.
Mr. Nyamekye claimed that the accused individuals were unable to account for the money after receiving it and continued to mislead investors about the Company through phoney weekly status updates that they instructed Mr. Melvin Neizer and Mr. Dominic Sarfo to provide.
According to the prosecution, an inquiry was carried up after the complainant received a formal written complaint from Lendable Asset Management LLC about the accused individuals' unwillingness to grant the company access to the OVA for an audit.
Noel Hammond, the chief financial officer, verified these claims, and the board later learned via inquiry that all supporting material, including financial records and data from the web dashboard, had been falsified by the accused.
Through their actions, Meridian Management and Investment Limited and Lendable Asset Management LLC were persuaded to give over $13.2 million, which was then mysteriously gone.
According to Mr. Nyamekye, the accusers were taken into custody after the complainant filed a police report for inquiry.
According to the prosecution, the accused confessed transferring $650,000 from the company to purchase a property in Abelemkpe, Accra, where they lived as a married couple, but claimed they were unable to account for the remaining funds.
Investigations, according to the prosecution, are still underway.
The prosecution first asked the court to put the accused individuals into police custody so that investigations could proceed.