The Minority Members of Parliament on the Mines and Energy Committee will be boycotting deliberations on the AMERI power agreement

An urgent motion filed by the Member of Parliament for Adansi Asokwa, K.T. Hammond, called on the government to reverse its decision on the power agreement.

K.T. Hammond, who was the ranking member of the Energy Committee of Parliament in 2015 when the deal was approved, filed an urgent motion seeking the reversal of the deal because of his conviction that the deal was suspicious, based on some fresh information available to him.

The former President John Mahama administration in 2015 agreed to rent the 300MW of power from AMERI at the peak of the country’s power crisis. As part of the deal, AMERI was to build the power plants and operate them for five years before transferring it to the government.

The deal cost $510 million, and received parliamentary approval on 20th March, 2015. It later emerged that the government had been shortchanged by AMERI as they presented an overpriced budget.

But the minority caucus on the committee has threatened that it will boycott the meeting scheduled later today.

The Minority Spokesperson on Mines and Energy, Adams Mutawakilu, in an interview on Accra-based Citi FM said his side does not think that “Parliament can refer a motion when it has not been debated on, and we don’t want to set a bad precedent.”

He added: “we don’t want government to use Parliament as the back door to rescind decisions that are effectively between the government and the company involved. Once government approves an agreement without indicating in the approval that they still have a say in respect to the rescission, Parliament cannot come later to rescind it. So we believe that, Parliament has no hands, and K.T Hammond cannot use Parliament to rescind a decision that has been approved, and based on that we will not take part.”