NDC grew local banks but Akufo-Addo gov’t collapsed them – Mahama

Former President John Dramani Mahama has said the National Democratic Congress (NDC) administration deliberately opened up to the system to enable more local players to take part in the banking sector that was dominated by foreigners.

He explained that deliberate policies were initiated by the NDC government, leading to the influx of local banks that were lending to small businesses.

This, he said, was done because foreigners had dominated the banking space in Ghana and were only dealing with large scale businesses.

But, he said, when the New Patriotic Party (NPP) took over, these banks have all been collapsed during the financial sector cleanup.

“First, they raised the capital requirement to ¢400million,” Mr Mahama said while addressing the United States Chapter of the NDC at the Bentley University on Sunday March 27.

He added “we came up with deliberate policies to encourage local people to open banks. That is how come UT bank, Unibank and all of them were formed and these were the banks that were lending to the smaller businesses because they understood the sector.”

The Bank of Ghana (BoG) during the banking sector cleanup exercise noted that poor corporate governance was one of the major causes of the collapse of the nine domestic banks and other financial analysts.

Source: 3news.com|Ghana