As many as 1.8 million Ghanaians invested in embattled Gold trading firm, Menzgold during its five-year operations, a private legal practitioner, Amanda Clinton has revealed.

Amanda Clinton, who is serving as Counsel for several aggrieved investors of the firm further indicated that at least $200 million dollars were invested – the highest single investment being $6 million.

In Ms Clinton’s view, the government of Ghana must, in a way, intervene in the debacle by giving Ghanaians a full report about how a company that was given several warnings by the regulators to stop operations over the five years, still managed to attract so many customers and have so much money pass through its vaults as an “unregulated” business.

She told Samson Lardi Anyenini on Multi TV’s Newsfile programme on Saturday, 29 December 2018 that the SEC should have stopped Menzgold from operating “within the first week”, since, according to her, there were too many red flags to ignore.

“Before $200 million was pumped into an unregulated company, the first week, Menzgold should have been shut down for three reasons. The first reason is they’ve opened as a bank twice; the same people opened as a bank twice and then they come to you with a different name and then you try to look into them, that’s a red flag because you are the same people and you’re trying to take deposits. The second issue, February of 2017, the Chairman of the finance committee of parliament comes out and says: ‘Look, as of February 2017, we had a meeting with Menzgold and we told them they are an illegal outfit. And, so, an illegal outfit as of February 2017 categorically isn’t shut down immediately?” Ms Clinton wondered.

Menzgold was ordered by SEC to stop its gold vault market operations in August 2018 over regulatory infractions.

Since then, the company has been unable to pay its customers their monthly extra values (dividends) as well as their principal investments.