- PDS Probe: Where Is the Crime If Ghana Has Not First Established the Debt?
There is a question at the centre of Ghana’s renewed investigation into Power Distribution Services that is becoming harder to avoid: what precisely are the Economic and Organised Crime Office and the Financial Intelligence Centre trying to prove?
Is the state investigating a specific criminal act supported by evidence independent of the commercial relationship between PDS and the Electricity Company of Ghana, or is it using criminal-investigative powers to determine an accounting dispute that has never been fully reconciled?
NorvanReports has spent time reviewing the documentary trail available on the PDS matter, including the November 2025 arbitral award, EOCO’s own court filings, PDS’s judicial-review application, correspondence to the Attorney-General, banking records and other supporting documents, because the public debate is increasingly being driven by arrests, account freezes and allegations whose legal and accounting foundations deserve closer scrutiny.
In this three-part series, we will take readers through those records step by step to separate what has been established from what remains allegation, what the arbitration actually decided from what it did not decide, and what evidence exists for the criminal theory now being pursued by EOCO and the Financial Intelligence Centre.
That examination has become even more important as lawyers who appeared to defend PDS-linked clients have themselves reportedly been treated as persons of interest and required to report repeatedly to investigators, including as often as three times a week, a development that raises legitimate questions about proportionality, legal representation and the precise basis on which professional counsel are being drawn into the investigation.
Our purpose is not to prejudge guilt or innocence but to test the state’s case against the documents themselves and ask whether the expanding use of investigative powers is being matched by equally clear evidence, legal reasoning and publicly defensible justification.
EOCO has put forward a serious case that cannot simply be dismissed. In its April 2026 affidavit seeking confirmation of freezing orders, the agency said preliminary examination of PDS bank statements, supported by Financial Intelligence Centre information, indicated that PDS received more than GH¢1bn in revenue on behalf of ECG between April 2019 and March 2026 but failed to account for or transfer it.
EOCO further alleged that significant withdrawals were authorised and that roughly GH¢230mn was placed in fixed deposits for interest while the arbitration with ECG continued.
Those allegations, if established, could justify serious legal consequences. No responsible examination of the documents should pretend that an investigative agency must ignore potentially suspicious transactions simply because a commercial contract sits somewhere in the background.
EOCO is entitled indeed required to investigate credible evidence that public funds may have been unlawfully diverted, and its Executive Director, Raymond Archer, has said the investigation is being conducted in a “professional and methodical” manner based on evidence and due process.
But an investigation becomes analytically vulnerable when the money said to have disappeared has not first been clearly identified as money legally due to the alleged victim.
The public narrative has at different times referred to GH¢850mn, more than GH¢1bn and funds allegedly belonging to ECG, yet these are not automatically the same thing.
Gross electricity collections, an outstanding contractual balance and criminal proceeds are three very different concepts, and the state cannot safely collapse them into one.
That is where the November 2025 arbitral award becomes critical. The tribunal decisively upheld ECG’s right to terminate the PDS concession because the US$350mn payment guarantees were void and essential conditions precedent had neither been satisfied nor waived.
Yet the same tribunal found that the Transfer Date Confirmation Letter was voidable because of common mistake, not misrepresentation by PDS, and it expressly held that PDS had not made the actionable misrepresentation ECG alleged.
That finding does not confer immunity from criminal investigation on PDS or anybody associated with it. A later diversion of funds, falsification of records, dishonest receipt or money laundering could exist independently of what happened with the guarantee, and criminal investigators would be entitled to pursue such evidence.
But the award makes it difficult to treat the invalid guarantee itself as proof that PDS perpetrated fraud against ECG when the tribunal concluded that both parties operated under a mistaken belief about the guarantee’s validity.
The award becomes even more consequential when one turns to the money now under investigation. ECG made counterclaims arising from the Interim Protocol, the arrangement governing relations after the main concession had been suspended, but the tribunal held that the protocol was a distinct agreement without an arbitration clause and that it therefore had no jurisdiction to decide those claims.
In other words, the arbitration did not decide that PDS owed ECG nothing under the Interim Protocol, but neither did it decide that PDS owed ECG GH¢850mn, GH¢1bn or any other amount.
This is the missing bridge in the current investigation. If the state says PDS collected money belonging to ECG and failed to remit it, where is the complete reconciliation showing what PDS collected, what it was contractually permitted to spend, what it paid to ECG, what it paid to generators and transmission entities, what it retained and what balance ultimately remained payable? Until that exercise is available, there is a danger of starting with the size of the inflow and treating the entire amount as the alleged loss.
Meanwhile, the payment schedule reviewed by NorvanReports illustrates precisely why that would be dangerous. The document lists approximately GH¢1.562bn in cedi-denominated transactions, alongside a separate US$1.602m entry, over the period shown, but those transactions include payments expressly described as transfers to ECG, retained-account receipts and payments connected to bulk generation, transmission services and lease obligations. Among them are entries of GH¢250m, GH¢126.20m, GH¢100m, GH¢98.13m and GH¢214.71m, demonstrating that very substantial sums were moving through different components of the electricity value chain.
What it does demonstrate is that gross receipts cannot safely be equated with an unreconciled loss without examining the corresponding outflows and contractual obligations.
PDS’s lawyers have essentially made that argument in their correspondence with the Attorney-General. They contend that funds standing in PDS accounts arose from a legitimate commercial arrangement and that, even if ECG has a legitimate claim to part of those funds, determining the balance is first an accounting question between the contracting parties.
They also acknowledge that the civil arbitration does not prevent an independent investigation, although they dispute that the existing material provides a proper criminal foundation.
The state has a credible answer available if its evidence is stronger than what has so far entered the public record. It can produce the reconciliation, identify the contractual entitlement, trace the money from the point at which it became due to ECG, identify the individual decisions through which it was allegedly diverted and then show the criminal offence arising from those facts.
That would transform the debate from political accusation and institutional suspicion into a forensic case capable of being tested in court.
What should trouble the public is that the investigative process has already travelled a considerable distance before that chain has been publicly demonstrated. Four people were arrested or questioned in May being PDS-linked businessmen Philip Kwame Asare Ayesu and Viraj Bhat, together with lawyers Justice Kusi-Minkah Premo and Sophia Kokor, in connection with investigations into funds said to belong to ECG.
The Attorney-General’s spokesperson said at the time that the investigation was preliminary and no formal charges had been filed, while more recent reporting still describes the matter as an ongoing investigation rather than a concluded criminal case.
The lawyers’ firm has said the two counsel were questioned about allegations including “dishonestly receiving” and “abetment of money laundering”, while strongly denying wrongdoing and challenging the basis on which they became persons of interest.
Those claims about how investigators treated them remain disputed, and EOCO maintains that its work is evidence-led and procedurally proper.
That competing account is exactly why the objective of the investigation matters so much. If investigators possess independent evidence showing that individuals knowingly handled money they knew belonged to ECG, the public interest requires the case to be pursued vigorously and ultimately tested before a court.
If, however, the supposed criminal property is itself defined by an accounting balance that has not yet been established, the state risks allowing the criminal process to answer a question that ordinarily belongs first to contractual reconciliation.
The FIC’s role makes the question sharper. EOCO’s own affidavit says the investigation followed a petition from the Financial Intelligence Centre concerning the payment-security guarantee and the involvement of PDS officials.
Once the arbitral tribunal later concluded that PDS had not misrepresented the guarantees, the legitimate question becomes whether the investigation found genuinely new criminal evidence or simply migrated from the guarantee to the money sitting in PDS-related accounts.
That migration may ultimately be justified. Financial investigations frequently begin with one suspicion and uncover another, and investigators should not be required to ignore evidence simply because it falls outside the original theory.
But the public is entitled to know the distinction between what triggered an investigation and what now sustains it, particularly when coercive measures have affected bank accounts, businesses, professional advisers and personal liberty.
The most important issue is therefore not whether one supports PDS or ECG. ECG won the central contractual contest at arbitration: its termination was lawful, the guarantees were void, and PDS’s principal claims failed.
But that victory cannot be stretched beyond what the award actually decided, any more than the tribunal’s finding of no PDS misrepresentation can be stretched into blanket immunity from later criminal liability.
What Ghana needs now is something less dramatic than an arrest but ultimately more powerful: a reconciled ledger. Show what was collected, what was paid, what should have been paid, what remained, where that balance went, who authorised its movement and what law was allegedly broken.
Only then will the public be able to distinguish a disputed account from a recoverable debt and a recoverable debt from a crime.
Until that happens, the question hanging over EOCO and the FIC will remain uncomfortable but legitimate: are they investigating an identified crime, or are they still trying to discover through criminal process whether a debt existed in the first place?
To be Continued……..
