Collins Dauda, four others charged with ‘causing financial loss to the state’ over Saglemi Housing project.

• Collins Dauda has been sued for causing financial loss to the state

• Collins Dauda has been accused for misapplying $200,000 in the Saglemi Housing project

• The state claim that Collins Dauda altered the initial plan of the project without recourse to Parliament

Alhaji Collins Dauda, Minister for Water Resources, Works and Housing under the erstwhile Mahama administration has been hit with charges of causing financial loss to the state over his involvement in the Saglemi Housing deal.

The state has slapped criminal charges on Dauda and four others who supervised the deal.

A statement of offense sighted by GhanaWeb states that Collins Dauda deliberately misapplied $200,000 and in that process caused financial loss to the country.

The Asutifi South MP has been accused of changing the initial agreement for the housing project without the approval of parliament.

“Alhaji Collins Dauda, between February 2016 and December 2016 in Accra in the Greater Accra Region you intentionally misapplied the sum of $200,000 belonging to the government of Ghana by causing the said amount, which had been approved by the Parliament of Ghana for the construction of 5,000 housing units, to be applied towards the payment of 1,412 housing units under the Saglemi Affordable Housing Project,” part of the statement reads.

The other four persons who have also been charged are Kaku Agyemang Mensah, Alhaji Ziblim Yakubu, Andrew Clocans and Nouvi Tetteh Angelo.

The charge represents a major step taken by the Akufo-Addo government over the Saglemi Housing Project after years of threats.

Samuel Atta-Kyea, the former Minister Works and Housing consistently issued threats of prosecution against government officials who were involved in reducing the housing units from 1,500 to 1,024 without recourse to Parliament.

In one of his usual commentaries on the project, Atta-Kyea last year said that the country was fleeced in the deal and that at right time, the state was going to prosecute all those involved.

“There’s no dispute about it, and I could tell you that the Ghana Institution of Surveyors has come out with a conclusive report to the effect that Saglemi is a rip-off and the amount of money that has been blown in Saglemi is over USD100 million and the housing structures over there do not measure up to the money they’ve collected”, he said.

“So, I’m not here to embarrass anybody; I’m here to say that if you didn’t go into the legalities of it, how do you continue? So, now that we’ve surrendered the report of the Ghana Institution of Surveyors to CID, now, we can deal with the issue of going to continue”, he added.

Mr Atta Akyea noted at the time that: “We’re pushing so hard to deal with the issue of Saglemi; it’s not abandoned. It doesn’t give this nation credit at all.

“They’ve invited several of them, including Honourable Collins Dauda. They’ve invited them but you see how civil NPP is; we don’t make it like a drama, so, the police are dealing with them. We’re not going to parade people like: ‘Look at how they’ve arrested this man or they’ve arrested that man.’

“That is what civility is all about. You do not try to embarrass somebody because you think that he’s been investigated by the police. Eventually, the police might say that they do not have anything against the person and you would have embarrassed him.

“So, all those people who were involved in Saglemi, they’ve started inviting them. I’m telling you and even people working in my Ministry, they’ve started inviting them. So, investigations are ongoing, let’s leave the police to do its work. There’s no propaganda or party issues about theft, theft is theft,” he said.