Northern Devt Authority Chases SADA Debtors

The Northern Development Authority (NDA) has served notice it will soon pursue all beneficiaries who owe Unik Savannah Company Limited, a subsidiary of the defunct Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA).

An ad-hoc committee established by the Board of NDA is on a fact-finding mission in the Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions to gather details about the assets and liabilities of the defunct company.

In 2015, SADA imported 5, 000 units of tricycles, motorbikes, and corn mills worth $9 million to support transportation and also alleviate poverty in the northern ecological zone.

The committee is mandated to solicit views and ideas on how to retrieve monies owed the company from defaulting beneficiaries, how to dispose of the remaining assets abandoned at the SADA yard exposed to vagaries of the weather.

Chairman of the fact-finding committee, Boniface Gambila, warned the debtors to be ready to pay back all money owed in order to avoid prosecution saying "NDA has a mandate to accelerate the needed development of the ecological zone, and the authority will turn a blind eye to the perception state property must be given to political party cronies.

"The committee is determined to sell the remaining machines in stock, the debtors claim they cannot pay back for items they got from SADA because they were overpriced under hire purchase because buying with cash from a vendor is different from buying on credit, we are yet to determine the credit facility, the percentage granted and the interest rate."

"We will do our calculations as of that time, to see whether it was reasonable, whether it matches with the norm elsewhere, we can then conclude they were overpriced or not," Mr Gambila said.

Unik Savannah Company Limited was a joint venture company established through a Memorandum of Understanding between SADA and its partners Unik Dezines and Jialing Motor Company limited with focus of Unik Savannah to procure, assemble and distribute light machines such as tricycles and two-wheeler motorcycles on hire purchase, payable within two years.

Unik Savannah procured some 5000 units of tricycles and 1000 units of two-wheeler motorcycles for assembling and sale in the Northern Savannah Ecological Zone which was facilitated by SADA by raising letters of credit from its bankers and shipping of the consignment to Ghana.

A total of 2,171 tricycles and 257 of the motorcycles were sold on credit before the management of SADA grounded operations of the company due to alleged malfeasance and mismanagement in 2015. -classfmonline.com

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