Captain Prince Kofi Amoabeng (Rtd.) has spoken about an attempt he made to join the Virgin Galactic Spaceship’s trip to outer space.
He stated that he had wanted to secure a seat on the spaceship to help serve a number of reasons, among others to be a distraction for him at a point and to also motivate a book he wanted to write.
Sharing bits of his life story on Citi TV’s ‘Point Of View’ programme that aired on December 8, 2021, the co-founder of UT Bank said he refrained from buying the US$200,000 seat also due to financial reasons.
“When Virgin Galactic was launched, you were supposed to pay US$200,000 and you will be on the first trip to space. So I was interested. I said fine, I will go on that trip and when I come back, I will write a book and the book will be called Kukurantumi to space.
“To show how a Kukurantumi boy can end up going to space, and I was very serious about it. The only reason why it didn’t happen was that I asked them (to) give me an estimated time, they said they couldn’t tell.
“Are you going to pay me interest on the 200,000, they said no. I said no! I am a finance guy, you cannot take my 200,000 and not know when I am going to be paid and not paying interest. So I shelved it,” he told programme host Bernard Avle.
He was on the show to discuss his book, ‘The UT Story – Humble Beginnings.’ The first in a three-part series looks at his days in the army and how he transited from the military into running a business concern that was swallowed by Ghana’s banking sector clean-up.
He said the idea to write a book was to help tell the full story of the UT Bank story from its beginning, steady rise through to its collapse.
Amoabeng also spoke about how golf played a crucial role in occupying him amid the legal back and forth that the company he helped found was going through.
