Kofi Ahovi

The Ghana Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (GHEITI) says enough progress has been made in tackling the issues of obscure licensing procedures and concealed ownership. Dr Steve Manteaw, the Co-Chair of the GHEITI, at a dissemination workshop, highlighted the significant progress that was made in promoting transparency and accountability within the extractive industry, leading to solving the longstanding concern of opaque licensing procedures. The workshop was part of the 2020 Ghana EITI reports on the mining, oil, and gas sectors held at New Abirem in the Birim North district of the Eastern region. In 2019, the government, through the Office of Registrar of Companies (ORC), and Parliament passed a new Companies Act (Act 992) that mandated the ORC to establish a central register for the collection of Beneficial Ownership (BO) information. Dr Manteaw said the transformative impact of the introduction of BO measures had successfully addressed long standing concerns about obscure...

 The Director-General of the Internal Audit Agency at the Presidency, Dr. Eric Oduro Osae, has urged businesses, especially those in the extractive sector, to fully comply with the Beneficial Ownership Transparency (BOT) initiative that Ghana has signed on to. He said the existence of a quality and timely beneficial ownership (BO) data was important to improve natural resources governance in the country. The government in September 2021, committed to the implementation and acceleration of BO disclosure and data use by joining the Opening Extractives (OE) programme, which is a global initiative aimed at transforming the availability and use of BO data for effective governance in the extractive sector. Speaking in an interview with the Graphic Business, Dr Osae said BOT, which helped to ensure transparency over who ultimately owned and controlled companies, was an important intervention to reduce corruption by preventing companies from hiding revenues that could be taxed. He said it ...