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There were four people involved in the theft of GH1,262,496.66 from Best Point Savings and Loans Limited, each sentenced to twenty years in prison.
The Accra Circuit convicted them. In the aftermath of the sentence, the four people broke down in tears, along with some relatives who were unable to control their tears. Before being escorted out of the courtroom, they shook hands with them.
Silas Adjei, former IT Officer of the Company, was sentenced to seven years imprisonment by the court presided over by Justice Malike Wornya. Justice Wornya is a High Court Judge who also serves as a Circuit Court Judge.
Additionally, Kwadwo Kudekor was sentenced to three years of imprisonment as a Supporting Officer of the Company.
Patience Adjei, sister of Silas and a mobile vendor and James Afadzie, a trader, are to serve five years imprisonment each. Silas and Kudekor were charged with conspiracy and stealing. Silas was additionally charged with unauthorized interference with electronic records and money laundering.
It was found that Faith and Afadzie participated in Silas’s crime and dishonestly received money stolen by Silas. There are reports that Silas acquired over 18 vehicles and other properties.
Best Point Savings and Loans Limited was the complainant, according to the prosecution led by Mr. Richard Gyambiby, a Senior State Attorney.
According to the prosecution, Patience was the sister of Silas and the wife of Afadzie. According to the State, the Company began using Bankers Realm software in January 2014, which was purchased from Kenya.
Management decided to purchase and migrate to a new system after realizing the current system had some shortcomings during operation, the State said.
The prosecution said at the end of the 2015 financial year, the Company started migrating from the Bankers Realm software to a more modern one known as X100 format.
An updated database, compiled based on the results of the December 2015 conversion test, was used for staff training in January 2016.
Another database was also converted for user acceptance testing of the new software, according to the prosecution. On March 18, 2016, a final database, referred to as the “Go Live” database, was also converted after all the tests had been completed.
A discrepancy between the old and the new software was detected during the final conversion of the data, according to the prosecution. According to the report, validation also revealed a transaction totaling GH₵1,262,496.66.
The prosecution told the court that a Kenyan consultant was employed to help investigate the course of the discrepancies. He found out that the system had been tampered with.
That was also corroborated by software engineers at Global Union System, another company.
Based on the prosecution’s findings, the transactions stemmed from four different accounts and were similar in nature.
Asante Seth, aka Precious Havor and Theophilus Aboagye, aka Dennis Amankwa, all friends of Silas and at large, are behind the different accounts.
During investigations, Silas was found to have fictitiously and illegally credited accounts with money, and deleted the transactions from the database for migration onto the new system.
In the prosecution’s view, the narrative of those transactions had been changed to “interest accrued” with all traits of the transaction being deleted, making it appear as though the transaction had been automatically created.
As soon as the discrepancies were discovered, Silas resigned from the company.
The prosecution alleges that Kudekor checked and transacted on four different accounts on several occasions during the investigation. There are two names on the accounts with different pictures.
In court, the prosecution stated that Silas was arrested at Pokuase on May 3, 2016, after the matter was reported to the police.
An investigation led to the recovery of a passport, DVLA documents for 18 vehicles, and a laptop, among other things.
It was also revealed that Silas’ wife had documents for three vehicles.
Silas was assisted by two police officers in disinvesting and cashing GH’195,233.72. He had invested in Ideal Finance as reported by the prosecution.
In addition to Kudekor, Kudekor was arrested on July 26, 2016.
