GN Licence Case: Court dismisses BoG appeal

The Court of Appeal today threw out an application from the Bank of Ghana (BoG), which challenged the jurisdiction of the High Court.

BoG had argued that the High Court has no jurisdiction to hear the complaint which is challenging the revocation of GN Saving’ licence. It argued that the only lawful forum for resolving the GN Savings concerns is the Ghana Arbitration Centre.

However, the High Court dismissed its application in December 2019; thereby causing the BoG to seek redress at the Court of Appeal.

Dismissal

Ruling on BoG’s application today, the Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed BoG’s application and directed it to go back to the High Court and justify the revocation of the licence GN Savings. Lawyer for GN Savings, Justice Srem-Sai, expressed concern about BoG’s legal gymnastics all aimed at stalling the case and thereby, perverting the course of justice.

Background

In October 2019, BoG and the Attorney-General raised a preliminary legal objection to the case brought by the Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom and two other shareholders of GN Savings and Loans Limited.

In the objection, the BoG and the Attorney-General argued that the High Court has no jurisdiction to hear the complaint which is challenging the revocation of GN Saving’ licence. According to the Attorney-General and the Bank of Ghana’s lawyers the only lawful forum for resolving the Applicants’ concerns is the Ghana Arbitration Centre.

This argument was opposed by Mr Srem-Sai.

In December 2019, the presiding High Court judge, Justice Gifty Adjei-Addo, dismissed the legal objection as frivolous and without merit. She then ordered the BoG, the Attorney-General and the Receiver of GN Savings to file their defences by January 17, 2020.

The BoG and the Attorney-General failed to file their defence on January 17, 2020 as directed by the court.

Rather, BoG appealed the High Court’s decision. It also filed an application at the High Court for a stay of the High Court’s proceedings pending the determination of the appeal.

Lawyers for Dr Nduom, again, opposed the application for stay of proceedings, arguing that it was a mere ploy to delay the proceedings as the BoG has not demonstrated that some exceptional circumstances exist to justify a stay.

The application for stay of proceedings was accordingly dismissed as without merit.



By this time the case had reached mid-March 2020.

Further Orders

The trial judge, then, ordered all the parties to file their defences and closing address by April 13, 2020 but the BoG and Attorney-General failed to do so.

While still yet to file a defence to the substantive case in the High Court, the lawyers for the BoG rather appealed to the Court of Appeal against the High Court’s ruling which dismissed their application for stay of proceedings.

While all this was going on, the lawyers of the Bank of Ghana had not taken any steps to prosecute their first appeal. For example, they failed to attend the High Court Registrar’s summons to settle the records of appeal. They also failed to satisfy the conditions of appeal which was served on them way back in February 2020.

Fed up with the delays and evasiveness of the Bank of Ghana’s lawyers, the High Court Registrar wrote to the Court of Appeal Registrar and recommended that the Court of Appeal should strike out the entire appeal for abuse of the court process.

Source: eddie a. owusu, contributor