BB Simons chronicles how the rise and fall of one MP maps the anatomy of a nation’s scam economy.
The Member of Parliament for Asante Akyem North is, as a matter of law, innocent until proven guilty. That principle is not in dispute. What is very much worth examining – separately from any court’s eventual verdict – is what the shape of his rise says about the Ghana that today’s elites have built. Because whatever a jury in the United States eventually decides, the pattern on display is already a portrait of a country sliding toward becoming a scam-factory.
The arrest, and what it exposed first
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On May 10, Dutch police pulled the MP off a KLM flight, acting on an American warrant. Parliament moved fast – within a week, he had a lawyer. But the more telling reaction came from the Majority Chief Whip, who complained about a lack of transparency from the Dutch authorities. Read plainly, that complaint is itself an admission; Ghana’s own intelligence and law enforcement apparatus had zero advance awareness that a sitting MP was under active investigation by a foreign government. Not partial awareness. Zero.
The indictment
Court filings reported this week detail an 18-count indictment: 15 counts of money laundering and bank fraud, 3 of wire fraud, 6 alleged victims, with individual transfers as large as $550,000 – many of them, notably, during the pandemic. The sums involved run into the millions. A court has yet to rule on any of it, and the presumption of innocence stands.
What is striking, though, is not the indictment in isolation — it’s how closely its timeline tracks the public chronology of the MP’s ascent.
A timeline that lines up too well
In January 2020, he launched Salt 95.9 FM in Agogo, with two of Ghana’s best-known broadcasters at the opening. That same year, he is alleged to have defrauded a victim of $515,000 using his parents’ struggling Chicago restaurant’s bank account.
A month later, he handed the National Chief Imam $4,000 and GH¢10,000, attributing the money to having “succeeded after travelling outside.” By 2021, profiles described him giving cash to more than 2,000 widows annually. Awards followed – half a dozen within about a year. A wave of news sites and bloggers enthusiastically chronicled the assembly of a business empire in just a few years: Wealthbridge Limited, Smart Group, real estate holdings, and more.
The most telling detail, arguably, is the bofrot. One breathless profile credited his meteoric rise to a “special mix” for bofrot – the fried dough snack sold on Ghanaian streets – marketed under his “Kub” brand. If there really were fortunes hiding in bofrot, one has to ask why Maa Yaa at Fanti New Town, who has been perfecting hers for decades, hasn’t scooped up that market herself.
In January 2024, the paramount chief of Agogo commissioned a 3,000-capacity mosque the MP had funded – and he used the occasion to announce his run for Parliament. He later claimed to have “singlehandedly” financed Medikal’s sold-out show at London’s O2 Indigo in May 2024.
Every one of these spending milestones falls within the exact years the indictment identifies as when the large transfers – allegedly tied to romance scams – moved through accounts under his control.
Why the pattern will repeat
Ghana’s political economy – call it katanomics, an economy run on quick, extractive wins rather than sustained value creation — offers no real feedback loop, no institutional learning. So expect the pattern to recur and, eventually, to overwhelm. Expect large, unexplained money to keep arriving without any credible business logic behind it, often funnelled through a diaspora triangle linking Accra, London, and an American city.
Expect it to be repackaged as overnight philanthropy. Expect every gate to prestige and power to swing open the moment money lands on the table. Expect the country’s stubborn attachment to outward respectability to keep being exploited – bought off with palaces, mosques, churches, and lavish socialite scenes, with an occasional radio station thrown in for good measure.
And expect these entanglements with power and prestige to keep functioning as informal immunity.
Of fourteen major scam, fraud, and drug cases examined for this piece, ten were set in motion by foreign agencies – not Ghanaian ones. Local institutions consistently arrive after the fact; to confirm, to remand, to convene committees. In effect, the country has outsourced its own risk management to the American FBI.
Even now, somewhere in Ghana, another overnight sensation is likely assembling the same playbook – handing out charity to widows today, arranging clerical blessings tomorrow, chiefly patronage soon after. The honorary “Dr.” title will follow, media coronation will pave the way, and eventually, a seat in Parliament. All the while, the same elites will keep mouthing platitudes about “national development” – as though they were not, themselves, the architects of the system that makes this possible.