DDEP blew up all the financial theories we know about how to plan pensions – Frank Adu

The government should have excluded pensioners from the Domestic Debt Exchange Programme (DDEP), Former Managing Director and Shareholder of Cal Bank, Frank Adu Jnr., has said.

It was his view that excluding the pensioners from the programme would have been a compassionate approach to take.

It is recalled that pensioners picketed at the Ministry of Finance to protest their inclusion in the programme. The leader of the pensioners who is also a Former Director General of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Dr Adu Anane Antwi said they fought for Issuer Exemption and not self-exempt.

He stated that the two were completely different. “If you don’t understand the issue between self-exempt and issuer-exempt you will not understand what we are doing,” he said on the Ghana Tonight show on TV3 on Wednesday, February 15.

He added “Nobody fights for self exempt, we are fighting for Issuer exempt and we haven’t gotten it. These are technical things, not even people in securities understand unless we do the analysis. We want to be at the issuer exemption status.”

They subsequently brought an end to the demonstration. Dr Adu Anane Antwi said ” We went to the Finance Ministry today to just thank [Ofori-Atta, the then Finance Minister] for granting our request, it wasn’t for any discussion. The picketing is over because we have gotten what we wanted.”

Speaking in an interview with TV3’s Paa Kwesi Asare on the Business Focus show Monday, February 19, Mr Frank Adu Jnr. said “The government missed an opportunity when they were doing this unfortunate DDEP, at the time people had become so sensitized to it that they were resigned.

“So I, when the DDEP was enforced the Ministry of Finance and the central bank, should have said to the institutions that they are going to reset this thing,  they are going to have to issue T-Bills,  we will reset by fiat, 15 percent and I think although it was an irregular sort of thought, I think the market would have supported it because the country was in the fix, this DDEP basically blew up all the financial theories we know about how to plan your pension..My first thought was my colleague pensioners, who have bought bonds, how are they going to survive?

“That was why there was so much agitation. I think the government should have, at the time they announced it, excluded pensioners even the Eurobond because if you look at the makeup of the holdings, people, 60 years and above,  who were in government local bonds and Eurobonds would be very small, so a compassionate approach would have been to isolate those and even take them out.”