By Gifty Amofa
Accra, May 29, GNA – Mr Harold Mensah, former Tema Community One Branch Chief Executive (BCE) of the defunct Beige Bank, has challenged the prosecution’s assertion that Michael Nyinaku, the accused, instructed the movement of customers’ funds without their consent.
Mr Mensah said the alleged movement of the over 10,000 clients’ monies from their current accounts to BCAM was impossible as their accounts were fixed deposits.
Mr Mensah, the sixth defence witness, was giving his evidence-in-chief in the ongoing trial of the former bank’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Nyinaku, the accused person.
He said there was no record to prove that the 10,000 plus customers’ funds were siphoned and no one had also made a complaint to that effect.
The BCE, equivalent to the branch manager, said, “With FDs, once they are booked, they cannot be moved. This is because, on the very elementary understanding of the Fixed Deposit (FD), all it means is that the customer has decided to lock the funds and will not deal with such funds over a period.”
“For this reason, the funds would have already been debited to the customer’s account at the time when the FDs were booked.”
The witness said an FD already booked cannot be moved again. Thus, the fact that an already established FD cannot be moved makes this assertion inaccurate as the same cannot happen,” he added.
The Court heard that, in the case of current account deposits, to say ‘funds have been moved from a customer’s account without their consent, simply means the customer did not intend to have the funds moved in the first place.”
“Thus, in simple terms, the movement was unauthorized in which case the funds must be brought back or as we say in banking, the transaction must be reversed,” he stated.
“The allegation that current account deposits of 10,000 plus customers were moved from their account and credited to BCAM at the instruction of the accused is impossible and cannot be true. I make this statement because as a BCE I have had sufficient training in banking and therefore I understand the rudiments of banking.
“The first reason I say this allegation cannot be true or possible is based on the simple fact that this act does not happen in the practice of banking or even in banking law. In banking practice, bank accounts are operated by bank mandates. When accounts are opened, the owners of the accounts specify mandates signatories to the accounts and the bank requests for specimen signatures of these signatories. It is only the person who has been appointed and documented as a signatory to a specific account that can authorize transactions to occur on that account.”
“Why I say this allegation cannot be true or possible is based on the practicality of the allegation. As I earlier explained, at The Beige Bank (and in the practice of banking) every single transaction that occurs on a customer’s account must be originated by a transaction advice which advice must be signed by the signatory to the account.
“Before the bank processes this transaction it would have cross-checked the signature on the advice to ensure that it matches with the specimen signature of the account holder in the bank’s system. It is also known that transactions can only be effected on a customer’s account at the instruction of the customer,” he explained.
“Stating how the funds could be moved, the defence witness said “The accused person if he instructed for funds to be moved from the current accounts of customers is to suggest that any or a combination of the following scenarios is what could have taken place Scenario 1: will be where the accused hacked the banking system and inserted his image in the system for over 10,000 plus customers. This would be to make sure that when the operations officers are verifying any customer instruction, they would see his image and assume it is him.
“Scenario 2: will be where the accused having placed his image in the system for over 10,000 plus customers then signed over 10,000 different specimen signatures and caused all of these different specimen signatures to be uploaded into the banking software to serve as a match to his photos which have dubiously been configured into the system. This would ensure that when the operations officers were verifying any customer instruction, they would see that the signature and photos were a match.
“Thirdly, Scenario 3: will be where the accused forged the signatures of over 10,000 plus customers
and for each of these customers, he presented transaction advice to the bank which transaction advice authorized the movement of the funds. This transaction advice would have been presented to several branches of the bank nationwide. This scenario further assumes that on every occasion when each of these 10,000plus transaction advice with forged signatures was presented at the several branches of the bank, the operations officers in conducting their verification and validation of each of the 10,000 plus transaction advice were unable to detect that the signatures of the original account holders had been forged.
“Finally, Scenario 4: will be where the accused actually issued express instructions by email or memo to the banking operations team and specifically directed them to debit the accounts of specific customers with various sums.
“I say this because at Beige most communication was done by email or memos and an action as strange, unusual, and sensitive as the one being alleged, cannot be authorized verbally. I say this again because it is only the banking operations team that has the capacity and responsibility to process transactions into customers’ accounts therefore if the accused wants any such action [as has been alleged] to be done, it is the banking operations team that he would have to issue instructions to. Now, considering that the transactions are alleged to have happened over a period of 19months (February 2017- July 2018) and on different dates then this scenario assumes that the accused must have issued over 10,000 of such different emails or memos to the banking operations team to serve as instructions for what he requires them to do.
Even if there were not 10,000 plus of such directives from the CEO, there would be a lot of them that would be attached to a list of customers, their account numbers, amounts that should be debited from their accounts, and the dates on which these debits should be executed,” he said.
Nyinaku is facing a GHC2.1 billion theft case as well as fraudulent breach of trust and money laundering. He has denied all charges and was granted bail by the High Court presided over by Mrs Afia Serwah Asare-Botwe, a Court of Appeal Judge with additional responsibility as a high court judge.
GNA