Alban Bagbin, the Speaker of Parliament, has said the government made a mistake in embarking on a financial sector clean-up exercise. In an effort to restore confidence in the banking and specialized deposit-taking sectors, the Bank of Ghana launched a clean-up operation in August 2017.

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This operation, according to the Central Bank, was taken to resolve insolvent financial institutions whose continued existence threatened depositors' interests.However, the government explained that the action was one of the factors contributing to the country's high debt stock.

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Nonetheless, the Speaker believes that “ It is the focus of every country to ensure they are in control of the banking sector, so if we had Ghanaians with banks having challenges, it was incumbent on us to make them succeed. I think our colleagues in government erred in not seeing it that way.”The Rt. Hon. Bagbin alleged that the government “tried and ensured that Ghanaians making it in the sector lost".

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 He continued that the country has lost GH¢25 billion in a bid to sanitise the banking sector, when the initial plan was to embark on a GH¢5 billion operation exercise to boost the sector. As of yet, we haven't been able to sanitize the system, according to Alban Bagbin.Ofori-Atta supervised the banking sector clean-up from mid-2017 to January 2020.

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 The clean-up saw a reduction in the number of banks from 34 to 23, while 347 microfinance institutions, 15 savings and loans, and eight finance houses had their licences revoked.While some of the commercial banks were merged to form the Consolidated Bank Ghana Limited, the state-owned GCB was allowed to swallow others.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission also announced that the government spent about GH¢21 billion on the banking clean-up exercise.Source: The Independent Ghana

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