1. On October 8, 2025, the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) wrote to notify me of a court hearing scheduled for October 20, 2025. I was required to attend as a prosecution witness in the OSP’s case against Adjenim Boateng Adjei, the former CEO of the Public Procurement Authority (PPA). Mr AB Adjei was a subject of my 2019 investigative documentary titled “Contracts for Sale.”
2. I had already testified in the same case for the OSP and was cross-examined from December 2022 to April 2024. 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.
3. In May 2024, the OSP filed eight “fresh” charges against AB Adjei, leaving out his brother-in-law this time. Four of the charges were on the offence of using a public office for private gain, and the remaining four were under the offence of “indirectly influencing a procurement process.”
4. Dropping and filing the charges again meant that the case, which had been in court for two years, had to start from scratch.
5. I requested and studied the old and new charge sheets, and after evaluating them together with the entire case I had witnessed, 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.
6. All eight “fresh” charges on the new charge sheet were on the old charge sheet, with the particulars of the offences remaining unchanged. There was no single new charge. Rather, the strongest charge under the offence of “influencing a procurement process” was dropped, making the new case even weaker than the old one.
7. I refused to testify until I got answers. I spoke to the Director of Prosecution at the OSP, with whom I had attended court proceedings when I first testified for the OSP on the matter. He repeated the reason the OSP gave to the court for withdrawing the charges, that a fresh investigation had found new evidence of substantial value that required that the case be dropped and filed again. My sources within the OSP said no new investigation was conducted, something my later discussion with Kissi Agyebeng would reveal.
The Director of Prosecution did not have the case docket before him, so he could not answer why Count 18 on the old charge sheet was dropped when the CHRAJ Report showed, with evidence, that the accused had “directly” influenced a procurement process.
Also, when I asked for the nature of the new evidence found, he said it was more financial recoveries from AB Adjei’s bank accounts. I asked how much more was uncovered in the new investigation, because I knew the amount Martin Amidu had uncovered from the accused person’s bank accounts as far back as 2019. The Director of Prosecution, again, could not say because he did not have the case docket before him as we spoke. He directed me to the lawyer handling the case.
8. I spoke with the lawyer working on the case, and 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. On why the charge of direct influence of the procurement process was dropped, the OSP’s lawyer handling the case could not answer. She was simply working with what she had evidence on. She joined the OSP in November 2023, but the case had been ongoing since June 2022.
I pointed out to her that CHRAJ had procured the evidence during its investigation and had sent the evidence to the OSP, but she said she did not see the three boxes of evidence that CHRAJ told me it had transferred to the OSP after its probe.
9. At this point, and together with other serious concerns I will explain below, 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. I requested the Director of Prosecution’s email address to write to him formally. Before I sent the email, I called the Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, and told him my intention to withdraw as a witness. This was on October 27, 2025. He asked me to hold on with the email and give him two weeks to get back to me with answers to my concerns.
10. After the two weeks, Kissi Agyebeng got back to me, but without the answers to my concerns. He said he still had not got answers to the concerns I had raised about the case. He needed more time.
11. A month after his first promise to get me the responses, the Special Prosecutor said he still had not got answers. When I asked when he was likely to get me the answers, he said he could not give a timeline.
He, however, said that he had ordered a fresh investigation into the case, and he did not mind dropping the charges and filing again. If this happens, it will be the third time of filing the same case, and everything will begin again. This is a 2019 case, and we are about to enter 2026.
12. Kissi Agyebeng admitted that the OSP had prosecuted based on my investigation and that of CHRAJ. The fact that he has ordered a fresh investigation after my queries and refusal to testify again means that no meaningful investigation was done, even after the OSP dropped the charges and filed again. If that investigation had been done, some of the concerns I list below would have been addressed.
My Concerns with the OSP’s Handling of the Case
1. One flaw I discovered was that, apart from my investigation and the CHRAJ report, the OSP did not undertake its own criminal investigation before going to court. Apart from the money found in AB Adjei’s accounts, which Martin Amidu had uncovered before leaving office, the OSP did nothing seriously on the matter. Because journalists do not have the power of the law to demand and receive certain types of evidence, state investigative agencies ought to do more before they proceed to court. In this case, the OSP did not do that.
2. During the trial, the court admitted my “Contracts for Sale” investigative documentary in evidence. The whole case started because of this documentary, which brought the issues of the PPA CEO to light. But it was later discovered that the OSP did not submit the documentary to the court. The pen drive that the OSP presented to the court as containing that evidence had some of the recordings I submitted to the Office, but it did not contain the documentary. The OSP said it was an error.
AB Adjei’s lawyers opposed it when the prosecution applied to have it tendered in. Fortunately, the court admitted it, and I was recalled for cross-examination on this evidence. Just after that, the OSP dropped all the charges, even though the prosecutors said my testimony and cross-examination went very well. All my evidence was admitted by the court, and the defence lawyers could not puncture my testimony.
3. Another concern I had was the OSP’s failure to “follow the money” in the case. Two days after I published the “Contracts for Sale” documentary, President Akufo-Addo suspended Mr AB Adjei and petitioned the OSP and the Commission of Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to probe and possibly prosecute Mr Adjei. The Ghana Integrity Initiative also petitioned CHRAJ to probe the PPA board and other matters.
CHRAJ completed its investigation in 2020, and President Akufo-Addo dismissed Mr AB Adjei. The OSP investigation, however, stalled because Martin Amidu claimed in a press statement that his investigators had been compromised.
Before Martin Amidu left office, however, the OSP’s investigation revealed that some named persons had paid cash totalling $4.5 million, GH¢14.8 million, and €54000 into Mr Adjei’s bank accounts. (His entire salary within the period could not have been up to $200,000.)
The CHRAJ report said Mr AB Adjei could not explain how he made all that money. He told CHRAJ, as contained in the report, that his water company did not have a bank account, so proceeds from that company were paid into his personal account. Unfortunately for him, the company he named was registered in 2019, while he started receiving those huge cash payments in 2017, when he took office as the PPA CEO.
The OSP froze AB Adjei’s bank accounts, but the freezing order expired after a year, when AB Adjei was not charged. He went to court, got the freezing order lifted, and withdrew all the funds from the accounts. When Kissi Agyebeng took office, and the OSP called me to come and assist in the investigation, I suggested to them to trace the funds, saying that beyond what went into the accused accounts, he might have acquired some property with cash that did not go into his bank accounts. The OSP did not do anything about the funds.
When the OSP finally charged AB Adjei in 2022, none of the charges mentioned the money found in his accounts. In the Mustapha Hamid and the NPA case, the OSP charged Mustapha with money laundering because the OSP found some money in his account that did not match his earnings. In AB Adjei’s case, however, the OSP was silent on the funds found in his accounts.
When the OSP dropped the charges and filed again, the money found in AB Adjei’s account was not mentioned in any of the charges. The Director of Prosecution told me the OSP did not charge him for money laundering because it did not know what he used the money for. The lawyer working on the case told me AB Adjei’s assets were not traced. An attempt was made and abandoned because that was not the focus of the case.
4. Another major concern I have on the AB Adjei case is that when the OSP dropped the charges in April 2024, it dropped the strongest charge in the series of charges under the offence of “directly and indirectly influencing a procurement process.”
Count 18 on the old charge sheet named a contract in the Savelugu Nanton Municipality, in which the CHRAJ Report showed evidence that AB Adjei “altered” the PPA’s board decisions to influence a procurement process that was eventually won by Mr. AB Adjei’s company, Talent Discoveries Limited.
The OSP’s Director of Prosecution, the lawyer working on the case, and Kissi Agyebeng could not explain to me why this charge was dropped. The CHRAJ report, which the OSP tendered in evidence in the second trial, contained evidence that backed this charge. CHRAJ told me it gave the OSP three boxes of source documents it gathered as evidence during its probe.
After dropping that charge, the OSP’s new charges in that series stated the offence as “indirectly influencing the procurement process to obtain an unfair advantage in the award of a procurement contract.” The old charge sheet, which contained the charge of direct influence, named the offence as “directly and indirectly influencing the procurement process to obtain an unfair advantage in the award of a procurement contract.”
Sammy Darko Indicts OSP
1. On December 2, 2025, the OSP’s Director of Strategy, Research and Communications, Samuel Appiah Darko, indicted the OSP’s handling of the AB Adjei case when he responded to a Facebook post by one Samuel Fahren Otoo on the AB Adjei case.
2. Sammy Darko began the second paragraph of his response with the following: “It is a fact that since the investigative journalist published his work, the trial is only now beginning.”
This is false. I had testified during the first trial of this case and was cross-examined on the case from December 2022 to April 2024, so the trial could not only be starting in December 2024. The trial started in 2022.
3. In paragraph 2: Sammy Darko said: “Let me repeat: investigative journalists provide a spark. What they uncover is not, in itself, evidence. Criminal investigators must scrutinise the material, build on it, corroborate it, obtain original documents, and ultimately convert information into admissible evidence.”
4. In Paragraph 3, Sammy Darko wrote: “Investigators [at the OSP] had initially relied on the journalist’s findings to proceed to court, but once the case was reviewed, it was found to be hollow and lacking strong evidentiary support. It was therefore re-investigated, with parallel financial inquiries and authentication of documents to address the deficiencies identified by the prosecutor.”
The charge sheet was signed by the Special Prosecutor, Kissi Agyebeng, so one wonders why Sammy Darko said it was the investigators who proceeded to court, and the prosecutors later reviewed the case.
5. But the indictment is in the reading of the two paragraphs together. First, he said investigative journalists present only a spark, yet he proceeded to say that the OSP relied on only the investigative journalist’s work and proceeded to court. And why did the OSP spend resources of the state prosecuting the case for two years before realising that it was “hollow”?
6. And is it not telling that the OSP relied on only the journalist’s findings but still left out the journalist’s main evidence, the audio-visual documentary, when submitting the evidence to court?
Conclusion
1. Likely, Kissi Agyebeng will complete his seven-year tenure as Special Prosecutor without this case getting to the point when AB Adjei will be asked to open his defence. This is a case in which President Akufo-Addo played his role excellently. The president referred it to the OSP, and not his Attorney-General, to handle.
2. The OSP had previously blamed the hostility of judges for its predicaments in the courts, but in this case that I witnessed, the trial judge did not show any signs of hostility towards the OSP. Almost all the objections raised by the accused’s lawyers were overruled. All the pieces of evidence I tendered from my investigation were admitted by the court. Observing her firmness and fairness in this trial and her handling of other cases, Her Ladyship Justice Mary Yanzuh, in my view, exemplifies professionalism at its highest standard. The OSP cannot blame the judiciary for messing up in this case.
3. In concluding his post on the PPA CEO’s matter, Sammy Darko stated: “So yes, cases may take time… What matters is that the case has not been discontinued.”
4. How wrong! That’s not all that matters. I’m currently a witness in two defamation suits against me. The A-G’s Department has taken my witness statement, and I will be a prosecution witness should the criminal trial start on my investigative documentary titled “The Licensed Sex Predator.” Some CSOs have filed a civil suit on the SML case, and I have committed to being a witness should the trial begin. And if the SML trial begins and the OSP calls me to testify, I will oblige.
Being in court every week will not be my full-time job. So, I cannot stay on the PPA case forever. I have done my part for my nation, so if those paid with our taxes think all that matters is that the case has not been discontinued, it matters to me that the case is never-ending.
Since 2019, this case has been in the OSP’s reports. It’s a waste of the nation’s resources to keep spending on a case and not making progress due to the OSP’s apparent lack of commitment.
5. When I refused to testify again, the OSP called the CHRAJ investigator to testify. If Kissi Agyebeng drops the charges and files again after the ongoing fresh investigation, then this witness would have done a vain job and would be required to mount the witness box the second time on the same case and go through the process all over again. I don’t know how he would take that.
6. These and other issues within my knowledge are the reason for my impatience with the OSP, and the office I have supported and defended all these years. I know a new office has challenges, but this case is one example that we must not accept all the excuses emanating from the Office of the Special Prosecutor, which is fast becoming the Office of Special Excuses.
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