Some customers of defunct First Allied Savings and Loans Limited on Monday besieged the Kojo Thomson Road branch of the Receiver’s payment center to demand payment of their locked-up funds.
President Nana Akufo-Addo had recently claimed that 98% of the depositors of the microfinance and savings and loans companies have received their monies.
But some customers of the defunct First Allied Savings and Loans Limited say they are yet to receive their monies after undergoing a validation process.
One of such customers, Frank Aboagye, who expressed his frustration over the development said he has personally gone through all the validation processes but is yet to receive his money.
“No amount has been given to me, and I’m not the only one. We have a number of customers of First Allied who have never received a penny and yet the receiver is sending out an impression that he has paid a sizeable number of customers, it is wrong”, he added.
Another customer, Halimatu Salifu, lamented how the situation has caused untoward hardship to her family.
“It’s been hard, in fact this is my mat. I came here today to sleep here until I get my money. I have been ejected from my room; I cannot feed my family. I’m suffering” she said.
Meanwhile, the Receiver of the defunct microfinance and savings and loans companies says there were some constraints in acquiring the data of customers of defunct First Allied Savings and Loans Limited.
PRO for the Receiver, Philomina Kuzoe, explained that the challenge has delayed the validation process of a few customers of some defunct companies.
‘In the case of First Allied, when we started, they really submitted their claims etc. When it was time to validate those claims, one of them had a court injunction and so we cannot even enter the building to take the data and validate their claims, so there was a kind of hold up” Madam Kuzoe said.
“The deadline for us to submit our claims was on October 18th. We had gathered over 660,000 claims and that is what we forwarded to our principals. So, it means for all those who were not validated within that period, it falls under late submission. Now, we have paid over 360,000 claims. We’ve paid almost 98%; we have about 2% to go and then we start paying the late submissions” she added.
Background
The Bank of Ghana (BoG), in 2019, embarked on a clean-up of the financial sector and revoked the licences of some banks, microfinance and savings and loans companies.
Although government says it has settled as many as 98 percent of customers, there are still pockets of agitations from across the country.
