The Special Prosecutor nominee, Mr Kissi Agyabeng, has said that Mr Gabby Asare Otchere Darko who is a leading member of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) is his professional colleague.
He said this when he was asked by Asawase lawmaker Alhaji Muntaka Mubarak during his vetting on Thursday July 22, whether or not he is a friend of Mr Asare Otchere Darko.
“Gabby is my professional colleague. My firm has represented him in several defamatory cases,” Mr Agyebeng told the Appointments Committee of Parliament.
He further dismissed claims he was involved in the controversial Agyapa Royalties agreement.
He said he was nowhere close to the agreement.
The first time he heard of the deal was when Mr Octhere Darko called him and complained that a Lawmaker had defamed him in relation to Agyapa deal therefore, he Mr Agyebeng should prepare a defamatory suit against that legislator, he said.
“I was not involved in Agyapa transaction in any form or manner,” he said when he appeared before the Appointments Committee on Thursday July 22.
He added “I certainly will investigate the truth of the matter ought to be told, I was not involved in the deal.”
He was responding to a question in relation to a claim by Former Special Prosecutor Martin Amidu to the effect that the Attorney General Godfred Yeboah Dame and Asaase Radio owner Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko are personal friends of Mr Kissi Agyebeng, who was recently nominated by the Minister of Justice for the Special Prosecutor job.
Apart from the trio being friends, Mr Amidu, in an article dated Thursday, 29 April 2021 also said they were classmates at the University of Ghana’s Faculty of Law and Ghana School of Law.
Mr Amidu, who extensively took on Asaase Radio for, according to him, publishing falsehoods about his resignation as Special Prosecutor to justify the nomination of Mr Agyebeng, said: “Asaase Radio appears to have been so bent on pressurising the President to announce their preferred choice as the Special Prosecutor (the Agyapa Special Prosecutor) that it forgot that the nomination letter by the Attorney General was addressed only to the President”.
“How then did the nomination letter of a new Special Prosecutor come into the public domain to make the rounds in the press?” he asked.
He said: “Asaase Radio should also have told the Ghanaian and international public that its surrogate and nominee Special Prosecutor in the published letter is a personal friend and classmate of the Attorney General, and the owner of Asaase Radio, all of whom attended the University of Ghana’s Faculty of Law, and Ghana Law School”.
He added: “The independence of the Special Prosecutor from the direction or control of any person or authority in the performance of the functions of his office is the operative statutory words for the nomination of an impartial Special Prosecutor! Not a word with an ‘ism’”.
