By Daniel Bampoe
The Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) has exposed what it describes as a grand scheme of corruption and official complicity in the controversial Strategic Mobilisation Ghana Limited (SML) contract with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).
According to the findings released on Thursday, October 30, 2025, the OSP said the entire deal lacked justification, violated financial laws, and served as a conduit for self-enrichment by politically connected officials.
A Dubious Contract Cloaked In Revenue Assurance
The SML saga traces back to 2019, when the Ghana Revenue Authority entered into an agreement with Strategic Mobilisation Ghana Limited to provide revenue assurance services in the petroleum downstream sector.
The company was later awarded additional contracts to extend its monitoring work to the upstream petroleum and mining sectors.
Under the agreements, SML was to audit and monitor petroleum liftings, provide data analytics for revenue collection, and offer price verification services.
However, the contract’s structure soon raised red flags, as many of these roles were already being handled by existing state institutions such as the Customs Technical Services Bureau (CTSB).
Despite these concerns, SML’s contract was renewed and expanded several times between 2019 and 2022, committing the state to hundreds of millions of cedis in payments.
The OSP Investigation
Following months of intense scrutiny from civil society, the OSP, led by Kissi Agyebeng, initiated an investigation into the SML-GRA deal.
The findings revealed that the contract was completely needless and fraudulently procured.
“There was no genuine need for contracting SML for the obligations it purported to perform,” Kissi Agyebeng stated at a press conference in Accra.
He described the SML arrangement as “a creation of official patronage and sponsorship based on false and unverified claims.”
The OSP determined that no technical justification or needs assessment was conducted before the contract was signed. It further noted that the GRA and Ministry of Finance ignored due diligence requirements under the Public Financial Management Act, 2016 (Act 921) and the Public Procurement Act, 2003 (Act 663).
Mandatory prior approvals were also disregarded, exposing what the OSP called “egregious statutory breaches.” Officials involved in approving the deal reportedly acted “with increased and emboldened impunity,” treating public financial procedures as mere formalities.
Ofori-Atta’s Direct Involvement
The OSP’s report directly implicated former Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, who allegedly played a central role in pushing the SML contract through despite being aware of its flaws.
Investigators discovered that Ofori-Atta issued directives in August 2019 instructing his technical advisor to integrate SML’s operations with those of West Blue Consulting and the Customs Technical Services Bureau, even though SML lacked the technological and operational capacity for the work.
The Special Prosecutor noted that the former minister was copied in every internal communication related to the project, making it impossible for him to claim ignorance of the company’s shortcomings.
Evidence further showed that Ofori-Atta personally approved payments to SML from three critical state accounts — the Consolidated Fund, the Petroleum Revenue Account, and the Tax Refund Account — despite repeated concerns about SML’s performance.
Kissi Agyebeng stated, “Had he not been personally benefiting from SML’s unlawfully procured contracts, his immediate duty would have been to halt payments to SML and demand accountability.”
Conflict Of Interest
The OSP report also unmasked a web of conflict of interest within the GRA itself. The former Commissioner of the Customs Division, Isaac Crentsil, who played a key role in promoting the SML contract while in public office, later joined the company as its General Manager after retirement.
Kissi Agyebeng described this as a clear case of “public office for private benefit,” suggesting that Crentsil’s actions while in office were influenced by the promise of post-retirement rewards.
“Upon retirement as the Commissioner of the Customs Division of GRA, Mr. Crentsil took up appointment as GM of SML, colouring his actions while in office as an inducement for future rewards,” the report stated.
The OSP believes that this revolving-door relationship between public officers and private contractors contributed to the entrenched culture of corruption and impunity that allowed the deal to persist.
Payments Without Work
One of the most damning revelations from the OSP’s investigation concerns the manner in which SML was paid. According to the report, there was no verification system to confirm that SML was performing the services for which it was being compensated.
The Special Prosecutor explained that payments were set on “automatic mode” — meaning the company received money at predetermined intervals, regardless of output or deliverables.
“There was no established financial management system of monitoring and verification to ensure that the Republic was obtaining value for the money it was paying to SML,” the OSP stated.
Investigators found that 15 months after its engagement, SML had no operational system to access customs control and valuation records — the core data necessary to perform transaction audits. Yet, payments continued to flow to the company.
This arrangement, the OSP concluded, directly caused financial loss to the state, as public funds were paid out for work that was neither verifiable nor delivered.
