The Danish Ambassador to Ghana, Tove Degnbol, has stated that investors from her country are reluctant to invest in Ghana due to unabated bribery demands by officials of government agencies whose job is to facilitate investment in the country.
She indicated that the development is worrying as many Danish investors have had to rescind their decisions to invest in Ghana.
Speaking at a business meeting Tuesday, she said: “Danish companies are reporting that they often find it difficult to do business in Ghana because they are confronted with requests for illegal payment of services or ‘facilitation money’. At the Embassy, we are proud when companies tell us that they would rather lose an order than become involved in the endless game of paying and being required to pay even more.
“Together with a group of Danish companies and their Ghanaian partners we have recently embarked upon an exercise to map out the situations where the risk of corruption is experienced to be large. We do so with a view to engage relevant authorities in a dialogue on how best corruption can be curbed.”
According to Ms. Degnbol, the high incidence of corruption has led to the Danish Embassy working on an anti-corruption policy that will allow businesses to work in a safe environment.
“We are trying to map where some of these things happen. We are anonymous because we are not trying to highlight a particular case. But we are trying to see if it is the customs clearing in the harbor, the public offices when you are trying to apply for say driver’s license or somewhere else. And we will be using these mapping where we see bribery and corruption taking place in our policy dialogue with the government, which will be used to develop initiatives to battle corruption.”
