Special Prosecutor, Martin Amidu, has chastised the Ministry of Finance for not consulting his office ahead of the 2019 Budget reading.

In November 2018, Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta announced a GH¢180 million budgetary allocation to the Office of Special Prosecutor.

Mr. Martin Amidu, who spoke to some journalists a year after his appointment, said his office had been completely forgotten prior to the budget reading.

He explained that although his office should have been engaged much earlier in the year concerning the budget, they had not received any such notice, hence his decision to prepare a budget himself and submit it to the Finance Minister for consideration in October 2018.

“Many people don’t know how the budget went there [Ministry of Finance]. I myself on my own submitted the budget in October. Nobody asked for it. I was almost forgotten about. I was forgotten about entirely until I prepared my own budget and submitted it,” Martin Amidu said.

He also gave credit to the Finance Minister for considering his Office’s budget in the face of the dire challenges they were confronted with.

“The ideal process is that, I should have been in the budget preparation process since January last year. By October, nobody had submitted any request for me to submit anything, I did it on my own with people I had gathered round. My luck is that we had a gentleman as a Minister of Finance who understood my plight and when he noticed it, he took it up,” the Special Prosecutor said.

“It is not intended for me, it is intended to make sure that this year, if we are lucky to get clearance, we can buy the equipment that will make it positive for us to be as effective as the anti-corruption in Hong Kong or Singapore or in any other place,” he said.

In an article he published recently, the former attorney general lamented that one year after his Office was set up, it is housed in a small three bedroom house that is woefully inadequate to accommodate any reasonable number of employees.

He also said the lack of subsidiary legislation and financial constraints have crippled his outfit to function efficiently.

His office was a creation of the incumbent NPP government as a specialised agency to investigate specific cases of corruption involving public officers and politically-exposed persons.

The Office of the Special Prosecutor was set up to also prosecute individuals in the private sector implicated in corrupt practices and to prosecute these offences on the authority of the Attorney-General.