The first wife of the former President of the Ghana Football Association (GFA)[Kwesi Nyantakyi], Christine-Marie Nyantakyi, has in a latest interview confirmed that her husband offered Ace journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas an amount of $100,000 in a desperate attempt to stop the public screening of his number 12 exposé on football corruption.
According to Mrs. Nyantakyi, her husband only gave out $100,000 because that was all he could pay.
Speaking for the first time on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana on Tuesday, Mrs. Christine-Marie Nyantakyi, stated that; in their desperation at the time after seeing pieces of the video, they were approached by some persons who said they could stop the screening for an amount of $150,000.
“Well, there’s information, and there’s truth in that information. Apparently, we became so desperate when we realized that all that they presented to us were false, so we tried to make some interventions, and they proposed that he pays some money. They proposed $150,000; my husband couldn’t afford it, so he gave out $100,000 dollars, and they came back to him and said the person says you need to add $50,000, and he said well, I don’t have it; that’s all that I have.”
Asked what happened to the $100,000, she said it was later returned to them when the video was shown.
“They brought $40,000 first; and then, later on, they brought $60,000 dollars. I have not gathered the courage to watch the full video, because the small that I watched, I knew that the way he is talking; that is not my husband; something might have gone wrong.”
Mr. Nyantakyi has been banned from all football activities for the rest of his life, and has been fined 500,000 Swiss Francs for various breaches of FIFA’s code of ethics after he was exposed by investigative journalist, Anas .
It would be recalled that before the screening of the investigative piece in June 2018, news emerged that Anas Aremeyaw Anas and his Tiger Eye PI team, had attempted to blackmail Mr. Nyantakyi by demanding $100,000 from him to stop the screening of the video.
The Anas camp however denied being a party to such blackmail, suggesting that someone might be seeking to serve as an intermediary for that purpose without their knowledge or approval.
By: Joseph Nii Ankrah