The ONLY Summary You Need on Groupe Nduom’s 7-Year Legal Battle | Bernard Avle Explains

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Dr. Nduom is a known person in Ghana.

[00:00:02]Interesting case.

[00:00:05]The matter he took to court, there were three you can call them appellants. So, he, Dr. Nduom, in person, and then Coconut Grove Regency Hotels and Conferences, which is a company he owns as the majority shareholder, and then Group Nduom were the three entities that took this matter to the High Court.

[00:00:24]Who are the defendants? Of course, the Bank of Ghana is the first respondent, right? And then, of course, the AG. So, in most cases, when you sue a government entity, the AG is also to be sued. So, Attorney General was in defense.

[00:00:35]Interestingly, the third respondent was GN Savings and Loans, and I need to explain this. This is important because at the time the suit was filed, GN Savings and Loans was in receivership. So, once the license is revoked, the assets and liabilities of the entity are handed over to a government-appointed receiver, Accountant Eric Nana Nipah.

[00:00:58]So, if if you wanted to sue the people managing the company as of the time the license had been revoked, you had to then sue GN Savings and Loans. So, you notice that the the lawyer for the third respondent is Philip Addison, who is the lawyer for the receiver. So, in a sense, the receiver, because the company was in receivership, so it's not as if Nduom is suing his own company.

[00:01:22]Because at this time, the company was not in his hands. The company had been taken over and handed to a receiver who was to dispose of his assets. And we'll come back to this receivership issue later. Initially, the lawyer for the Attorney General's Department was not uh Godfred Dame, because don't forget this was 2019. At the time, Dame was the Deputy Attorney General. So, there was a a certain lawyer called Akawari Akundan.

[00:01:45]He was the lawyer before Dame took over.

[00:01:48]Another interesting point was that Frank Davies was the lawyer for the Bank of Ghana. We know that these days he, among other things, is one of the lawyers for Ken Ofori-Atta, the finance minister. All right. But it's interesting the finance minister was not part of this suit, or the finance ministry was not part of this suit. Although if you read the case, you notice that in the claimant, they would mention the role of the finance ministry because the main argument of Dr. Duffuor's company was that, "Look, you say we don't have enough capital.

[00:02:18]The government owes us.

[00:02:19]And the we we have been issued interim payment certificate. The Ministry of Finance is supposed to pay us. They haven't paid us. If they pay us all they owe us, which amounts about 2.2 billion cedis, it will be enough for us to be both solvent and even liquid." That was their main argument. Okay. Another interesting point of fact is that the current AG deputy was lawyer for Duffuor. Of course, this was prior to NDC coming into office in 20 24. So, those are interesting points of fact. All right.

[00:02:49]So, the BoG was the entity that on 16th August 2019 revoked the license of GN Savings and Loan. As I've said, GN Savings and Loan was actually GN Bank. They had received a banking license in 2014 under the previous government.

[00:03:08]And this they say they had 300 and over branches, and they were working to capitalize because when a bank is a license is given, you must put in shareholders must put in capital, enough money to serve as a buffer. All right.

[00:03:23]At the time it was 400 million cedis.

[00:03:26]They say that if you put together all the amounts that the government of Ghana through its entities, whether it's Cocoa Board or Road Fund, and all these entities owed them, the it was well in excess of the amount they needed to capitalize, and that they would be in a position of solvency. Now, we need to separate two key issues here.

[00:03:45]An institution is declared insolvent if it cannot essentially have enough assets over its liabilities. Basically, what it owns versus what it owes. If what you owe is more than what you own, you are insolvent. But, there's a more important measure of a company's health, which is liquidity. So, you can have a land in Kaswa, but that doesn't mean you have money to pay salaries. So, liquidity is more important than solvency. And it appears that the one of the key issues with the bank at the time was lack of liquidity because some of its people who it owed were complaining that the company could not pay it. All right. So, in 2019 August, within the same week that the license was revoked, Dr. Indum and his two affiliate companies, Coconut Grove Hotels and Group Indum, took the matter to the the Human Rights Court, right?

[00:04:44]The Human Rights Court sat on the matter. There was a preliminary objection from the respondents that this is not even the right forum. This is not a human rights issue. And that the way the Bank of Ghana Act has been put out, there's a clear procedure for finding resolution to your grievances.

[00:05:00]The court did not agree. These people took the matter to the Court of Appeal, which seemed to agree with them that this is not the right forum. But, the matter went all the way to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court said, "No, this is the right forum. So, come back here."

[00:05:12]Now, when they came back here, the court listened to all the arguments, and in January 2024, it came up with a judgment that said, "Your license was revoked by your rights were not abused. It wasn't a human rights abuse.

[00:05:28]There was a a cause because you were insolvent. You didn't have enough assets to override your liabilities. So, in a sense, the BOG and this side won the case, but Dr. Indum took the matter to the Court of Appeal.

[00:05:47]And the court of appeal on 21st May, this is just last week Thursday, a three-member panel unanimously said no, the high court was wrong in saying that these guys were right. That indeed the human rights of GN Savings and Loans was abused, right? And therefore, the court said they've done three things. Number one, they have quashed the decision of the lower court, which is what the court of appeal does.

[00:06:21]In addition to basically saying that thing that the BoG did in August 2019, they've also reversed it. So, that's how powerful the court is.

[00:06:30]The decision to revoke the license of GN Savings and Loan was wrong.

[00:06:35]So, it's been quashed, right? And then, number two, the mandamus, give them back their license. So, you did a wrong thing to them by revoking their license. Give them back their license. That's what the lawyers call mandamus.

[00:06:48]Give them back their license. And then, return their assets to them because don't forget there's a receiver, right? The receiver is the person who has been given the right, because if a company is insolvent and you revoke his license, there are people it owes. The receiver must manage that process. It's administrative. And the the bank the the the court is saying, give them back their assets as they are, because some of those assets may have been sold to third parties. So, there's a lot of questions to be asked about what this actually means. So, for example, will the Bank of Ghana say, "We don't agree with the court of appeal. We want to go to the Supreme Court."

[00:07:28]Will the Bank of Ghana say this, or they'll say, "You know what? This has gone on for too long."

[00:07:32]The court of appeal has quashed the high court decision. So, we have to take steps to return their license to them. So, that's one issue that has to be discussed, all right? But that's not even all. Now, if you if you give them their banking license even today, are there any assets, for example, maybe the receiver may have sold off some of their branches and some of their machines and their cars to pay off people it owed?

[00:07:57]How are you going to get those things back? So, does it mean that the Bank of Ghana in giving them back their license will have to recapitalize them? That's a very important question that we have to ask.

[00:08:07]Now, if the Bank of Ghana decides not to challenge this, what does that mean for its regulation going forward? Because the Bank of Ghana has very strict standards. And if you read some of the things that the institution said about this entity to decide to revoke its license, it basically said beyond being insolvent, it was not also being well run. That was the argument that