Government gambling pension funds on collapsing ADB and NIB -Adongo

By Nana Asare Barimah

The Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) and the National Investment Bank (NIB) are both collapsing because they have no solvency according to the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bolgatanga Central, Hon Isaac Adongo yet government wants to gamble pension funds on them, MyNewsGh.com has filed.

According to the ranking member on finance, the minority in parliament will join forces with workers to kick against moves to inject part of their pension funds into the two banks indicating that there is already trouble of the funds being locked up in some financial institutions following the banking crises in the country.

In his view, government is already shielding some vital information about the true ownership and operations structure of the newly constituted Amalgamated Bank warning that risking pensions fund on ADB and NIB needs to be resisted

“Quite clearly, there is something they are not telling us because the structure and operations of Ghana Amalgamated Bank and its true ownership is such that it cannot be a private arrangement. We are struggling to see where that private arrangements comes in and we are worried even that we want to risk pension funds. You recall a few years ago only three senior citizens of Ghana….I don’t want to mention their names… when they retired and needed to take their lump sum, SSNIT basically came down crumbling. It was so huge that they did not have money to pay. So private entities are now managing those monies and must manage those monies to generate significant returns so that when you are going on retirement you can take a very huge lump sum to go and begin your life while every month you take your normal pension”, he stated.

The lawmaker insisted that using pension funds is not the way to go cautioning government to hasten slowly in that respect.

“Now you want to risk your money on banks that you yourself can see clearly are collapsing, these banks don’t have solvency like I mentioned in the case of NIB. NIB needs like one billion to survive because they have no solvency. You want to risk our money and gamble our money on that? Prudential Bank is in negative capital you want to risk our pension money on that? So clearly we are making it emphatically clear that we will support workers to resist any attempt to spend even one cedi of pension fund on this transaction. Two billion is nothing government cannot just go on the market to borrow and to finance the transaction and to be risking our investments is something we can tolerate.

As a minority we are kicking against plans to use pension funds to support these banks and not only us, are workers groups already complaining that they don’t want it. Already the workers’ fund is suffering from the banking crises. As we speak today their monies are locked at GCB”, he added.

Source:MyNewsGh.com