To favour gov’t, KPMG left Manasseh Azure out

Legal practitioner Martin Kpebu has punched holes into the over 300-paged KPMG report on the SML and GRA revenue deal. He said the firm’s choice to leave out the lead investigator, Manasseh Azure Awuni in the documentary meant they only wanted things that would favour the government and SML.

Martin Kpebu argued that the government has been working with KPMG and knows that the auditing firm will be soft on them which is why they were chosen for the job.

“Going straight into it, one thing is very clear that the report though is very soft on SML and of course, you can understand why the President chose KPMG because they know that government has dealings with KPMG, so KPMG will be very charitable.”

The lawyer added that KPMG intentionally left Manasseh Azure Awuni out despite him leading the Fourth Estate team to conduct the investigation that leaked the deal. He said they would have done themselves some favours by at least talking to him and not including it in the report.

“As we make the point that this KPMG report is skewed, one other way of knowing is that when you read from page 195 onwards you see that they interviewed everybody else apart from Manasseh…you could have interviewed him and not used it but to have left Manasseh out, the man who did the investigations and brought this out, that tells you that KPMG is not up scratch.”

According to Martin Kpebu, Manasseh is a primary source of information for the report so KPMG’s decision to sideline him means they did incomplete work.

“If you’re looking for insight, the first person to get insight from will be the one who did the documentary that led to all of this,” he said on TV3’s The Key Points.