Investigative journalist Manasseh Azure Awuni has accused the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) of weakening its own case against former Public Procurement Authority (PPA) boss A.B. Adjei.
He revealed that he withdrew as a witness after growing convinced that the prosecution was not committed to securing justice.
In a detailed statement, he said the OSP notified him on October 8, 2025, about another court hearing scheduled for October 20.
He was required to return as a prosecution witness in the case against the former PPA CEO, who was the subject of his 2019 documentary, “Contracts for Sale.”
According to him, he had already testified for the OSP and was cross-examined from December 2022 to April 2024.
He said, “After almost a year and a half of using my time and resources to help prosecute the case, the OSP dropped all 17 charges against AB Adjei and the one charge against his brother-in-law, Francis Arhin.”
He said the OSP filed eight fresh charges in May 2024. Four were for using public office for private gain. Four were for indirectly influencing a procurement process. But he said restarting the case meant “the case, which had been in court for two years, had to start from scratch.”
Manasseh said he studied the old and new charge sheets and grew suspicious. He said, “it appeared as though the prosecution was working in favour of the accused person, and I was being used as a pawn in a preprogrammed chess game.”
He discovered that all eight “fresh” charges already existed in the old charge sheet. “There was no single new charge,” he said. He added that the strongest count on influencing a procurement process had been dropped, making “the new case even weaker than the old one.”
He refused to testify again until he got answers. He said he engaged the Director of Prosecution, who repeated the OSP’s explanation that “a fresh investigation had found new evidence of substantial value.”
But Manasseh said his sources within the OSP told him no such investigation took place. His later discussion with Special Prosecutor Kissi Agyebeng confirmed the same.
He said the Director of Prosecution could not explain why Count 18 was removed, even though the CHRAJ report showed evidence that the accused had “directly” influenced a procurement process.
The Director also could not tell him the amount of “new” financial evidence allegedly found. He did not have the case docket.
Manasseh contacted the lawyer handling the case. He said she “admitted to me that apart from bankers who were called to authenticate the transactions, no new money was found in AB Adjei’s bank accounts.”
She also could not explain why the direct influence charge had been dropped. She told him she did not see the “three boxes of evidence” that CHRAJ said it transferred to the OSP.
“At this point,” Manasseh said, “I was convinced the OSP was not committed to prosecuting the former PPA CEO’s case, and I was not going to waste my time testifying the second time, when the case was even weaker than it was when I first testified.”
He contacted the Special Prosecutor on October 27 to inform him of his intention to formally withdraw. Kissi Agyebeng asked him to wait two weeks for answers. But after two weeks, Manasseh said the Special Prosecutor “got back to me, but without the answers.”
A month later, Kissi Agyebeng still had no answers. “He said he could not give a timeline,” Manasseh noted.
The Special Prosecutor later said he had ordered a fresh investigation and did not mind dropping and refiling the case again. Manasseh pointed out that “this is a 2019 case, and we are about to enter 2026.”
He said the Special Prosecutor admitted that the OSP had prosecuted based on his investigation and CHRAJ’s work.
Manasseh argued that ordering a fresh investigation at this stage showed that “no meaningful investigation was done,” even after charges were refiled.
He said any serious probe should have addressed the concerns he had raised.
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