Former Chief Executive of the National Food and Buffer Stock Company (NAFCO), Abdul-Wahab Hanan, has asked the High Court to review an order that allowed the Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) to freeze four properties linked to him.
His argument in an affidavit is that EOCO wrongly listed properties that either do not belong to him or were acquired several years before he took office in 2017, and therefore fall outside the period under investigation.
EOCO secured the confirmation order on 21 October from Justice Kwame Gyamfi Osei of the Adentan High Court. The ruling upheld an earlier ex parte request to freeze four properties in Tamale, including two plots of land, an uncompleted storey building and a three-bedroom house.
Hanan says the agency has failed to show that any of the listed assets are “tainted property” connected to criminal conduct. He insists the three-bedroom house at Kpalsi was bought in 2011 and completed in 2013, and was even used for part of his Islamic marriage ceremony that year.
He also disputes ownership of the uncompleted storey building at Gumami, saying it is not his property and should never have been included in the order. On one of the plots of land, he says it belonged to Al-Qarni Enterprise, an entity in which he has no interest, and that it was later transferred to OSGAF Furniture Enterprise in 2022.
According to the affidavit, EOCO “froze every property tangentially connected to him” without adequate evidence and without regard to when the assets were acquired.
Hanan argues that the confirmation order violates his constitutional right to own property because some of the assets were acquired in 2013, well before he joined NAFCO. He further claims the freezing order offends the presumption of innocence since he has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
His application maintains that EOCO did not satisfy the legal requirements under Act 804 for securing such an order and that the decision is “null, void and of no effect.”
His lawyers, Dame and Partners, are scheduled to move the application on 18 December as they seek to overturn the October ruling and have the court lift the freeze on the four properties.
