As part of efforts to reform the arbitration environment in Ghana, the Attorney General and the Minister of Justice Godfred Yeboah Dame says the government is taking steps to ensure that most international arbitrations involving Ghana take place in the country and are regulated by Ghanaian law.
“Thus, I will present to Cabinet in the next few days, as part of the processes for the passage into law, an amendment to the State (Property and Contracts) Act, 1960 (CA 4), to mandate all contracts involving the State and its agencies as parties, to not only stipulate Ghana law as the governing law but also to have Ghana as the seat of arbitration and with the ADR Centre in Accra being the venue for the arbitration.”
“With this amendment, the practice whereby the State and Ghanaian lawyers travel to various jurisdictions – Paris, New York, London, Singapore, etc. for the conduct of arbitration involving the Government of Ghana and where arbitral awards are enforced all over the world at enormous cost to the State will cease and will be consigned to history,” Mr Dame said in his address at the conference of the Ghana Bar Association in Kumasi on Monday.
He further noted that an important piece of legislation introduced recently which seeks to reduce unnecessary cost to the taxpayer is the Contracts (Amendment) Act, 2023 (Act 1114), by which public officers are prohibited from entering into a contract on behalf of the State in which the rate of interest is stipulated as compound interest.
“By Act 1114, it is expected that contracts with high rates of interest especially compound interest which result in huge judgment debt and financial loss to the State, like what occurred in the NDK Financial Services Limited v. The Attorney-General & 2 Others case a few years ago, will be avoided,” he added.
Furthermore, Godfred Yeboah Dame stated that the era where unwarranted, dubious and scandalous judgement debts were secured against the state is over following measures his office has put in place to defend the state against those claims.
Godfred Dame said his office from 2021 to date has saved the state about GHC15 trillion in judgement debts. “Three years ago, when I stood before you at Bolgatanga, I undertook to build a formidable civil litigation team capable of zealously protecting the interests of the State in litigation, just as private legal practitioners do for their clients. The Civil Division, with the leadership of my humble self and my able deputies, has lived up to this challenge and done so much to protect our taxpayers’ pockets in litigation in a way that staggers the imagination.
“Through an unwavering commitment to justice and the protection of the interests of the State, the Office of the Attorney General has succeeded in saving the State many billions of United States dollars, being the equivalent of over Fifteen Trillion Ghana Cedis in numerous civil litigations in Ghana and various international fora since I assumed office. The era of unwarranted, dubious and scandalous judgment debts against the State, I can say, are clearly a thing of the past,” the Attorney General remarked.
“There has not been a time that the Office has been more exposed to international litigation than the era in which we live. Industrialisation, the expansion of the economy and the increase in investments have enhanced the risk of the nation in dealing with challenges filed on the international stage in respect of disputes arising from the State’s relations with corporations and multinationals.
“The State has had to litigate in the domestic courts of Norway (from the Oslo District Court all the way to that country’s Supreme Court), it has had to defend numerous arbitration claims in the Permanent Court of Arbitration, the London Court of International Arbitration, ad hoc arbitration tribunals with seats of arbitration being Paris, Stockholm, New York, etc.,” the AG added
It is gratifying to note that in each of these international arbitration claims filed since 2021, the State has achieved favourable outcomes with little or no cost to the nation. We have protected state properties, preserved the nation’s rights and fought off claims for billions of United States Dollars against the State even in a situation where a particular decision of a Minister is impugned by an international tribunal,” Godfred Dame further remarked.
