Over 200 undervalued bus sale cost ¢1m loss in shady Metro Mass Transit deal

JoyNews investigations have uncovered that the state-owned Metro Mass Transit Limited lost over ¢1 million, as a result of under-valuation of more than 200 buses sold by the company. 

The buses were declared “unserviceable” and as a company policy, they were supposed to be sold off as scrap. 

JoyNews, however, found out the valuation process was compromised and this has cost the company more than one million cedis in revenue.

An auctioneer who claims to have facilitated the sale of 18 unserviceable buses, complains that he has been shortchanged.

He told JoyNews' Manasseh Azure Awuni that the buses were sold to people recommended by the Board Chair, Ahmed Arthur.

According to him, Mr Arthur promised him ¢100 on each bus in addition to his auction fees. But Mr Arthur has denied any involvement in the sale of the buses.

In December 2016 and February 2017, the Valuation Department of the State Transport Company (STC) valued 202 buses at ¢1,397,000.

In October 2017, the Chairman of the Scrapes Committee mandated to oversee the disposal of the buses wrote to the Managing Director of Metro Mass, raising questions of inaccuracies in the valuation report.

In that memo, he said, “for instance, the evaluation report would indicate that there is no engine in a particular. However, a physical examination of the said bus revealed otherwise.”

This means with that with the engines and other parts, the value of the buses ought to be higher than the ¢1,397,000.

The Committee made three suggestions to the Managing Director, Bennet Aboagye. It said;

However, six days after receiving the memo, Bennet Aboagye wrote to STC to revalue the buses.

When JoyNews contacted him for his reason for the re-evaluation, he said the buses had no engines although the valuation report said they had engines.

After a report from his Scraps Committee was produced to falsify his claims, he insisted the revaluation is the best option in the circumstances.

Sources in Metro Mass Transport Limited say they expected the value of the buses to go up since it was confirmed that they had engines and other parts contrary to earlier valuation report.  

When the revaluation was done, however, the value further fell by 85%, dropping from 1, 397,000 cedis to 373,800 for all 202 vehicles.

Joy News went to STC to find out whether it was true that the first valuation report was inaccurate as the Metro Scraps committee complained.

The Head of Valuation, Enoch E. Ackon, defended the report saying it was a reflection of what they had inspected.

Apart from the Metro Mass Scraps committees’ findings, we also discovered that the condition of the 202 buses was the same, word for word.

We pointed out to him that it was impossible to value 202 different vehicles and write a report that indicated each of them had exactly the same problem.

At this point, he called one of his engineers who admitted the valuation report, was indeed, compromised.

When I asked why the value of the buses reduced drastically after the second valuation, the STC valuation team said time had elapsed. They also said that the engines and other parts were removed from the bus after the second valuation.

Sources in Metro Mass, however, say that statement is false. According to insiders, the buses were sold cheaply to persons linked to some management and board members who then resold them at higher prices and the margins shared.

The MD, Bennet Aboagye and the Board Chairman, Ahmed Arthur, have denied any wrongdoing in the deal.

But Joy News has evidence that the valuation of the buses was compromised and the company appears to have lost at least one million cedis in this transaction.

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