The former Commissioner for the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Emile Short has called for the prosecution of the managers and board members whose actions led to the collapsed of five indigenous banks.

According to him, they should be found guilty for contributing to the collapsed of the banks.

The Bank of Ghana on Wednesday announced the consolidation of five banks into a new entity called the Consolidated Bank Ghana limited, which is 100 percent state-owned.

They are Beige Bank, The Construction bank, The Royal Bank, UniBank and Sovereign Bank.

It said the banks had flouted some laws.

The affected local banks are said to have run into liquidity challenges and have been forced to come under a new merger to be managed by the state.

But Mr. Short believes that persons who contributed to the collapse must be liable for prosecution so as to retrieve monies lost.

“…there have been various violation of the banking law as well as other legal provisions and some of them I believe bother on criminality. And people want to see whether there will be criminal prosecution to avoid this kind of reckless behaviour. I want to see prosecution across the board, you know not selective prosecution, no because that will be unfair” he said.

Among other things, some of the consolidated banks obtained their licenses under false pretenses.

“In the case of Sovereign Bank Limited, as part of Bank of Ghana’s investigations into the failure of Capital Bank Limited (currently in receivership), it emerged that Sovereign Bank’s licence was obtained by false pretenses through the use of suspicious and nonexistent capital,” the Bank of Ghana boss, Dr. Ernest Addison stated at a press conference on Wednesday.“Beige Bank and Construction Bank were each granted provisional licenses in 2016 and launched in 2017. Subsequent investigations conducted by the Bank of Ghana, revealed that similar to the case of Sovereign Bank, both banks obtained their banking licences under false pretenses through the use of suspicious and non-existent capital, which has resulted in a situation where their reported capital is inaccessible to them for their operations.”