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KEN OFORI-ATTA ASSUMES OFFICE AS GHANA’S FINANCE MINISTER
Mr Ken Ofori-Atta has assumed office as Ghana’s Finance Minister after having been sworn-in on January 27, 2017, by his Excellency the President.
Mr Ofori-Atta and twelve other Minister-designates were approved by Parliament on Friday, January 27, after going through a successful vetting process by the Appointments Committee of Parliament.
According to Mr Ofori-Atta, his immediate priority will be the protection of the public purse, stabilization of the country’s macro-economy, spearheading anti-corruption, increasing revenue and introducing policy initiatives to grow the economy eventually at double digits for the private sector to thrive and create jobs. “We will create wealth and improve people’s lives by ensuring economic freedom as the mainstay of the economy. I am committed to cleaning up our public finances, managing the enormous debt that we have inherited in order to create the needed fiscal space, invest in critical infrastructure and empower the private sector to create jobs”, he said, in response to a question on his vision for his tenure.
He noted that the 3-year IMF programme was needed to achieve fiscal consolidation, though it was presently in a delicate state and pledged government’s commitment to it to ensure that all the necessary structural benchmarks that might be suggested were met.
He also gave the assurance that NPPs Manifesto pledges would be fulfilled in spite of the daunting economic challenges and was optimistic that in the President’s first budget, a clear path towards fulfilling the manifesto pledges and opening economic space for the private sector to thrive would be charted.
Mr Ofori-Atta pledged to leave a legacy of a Ministry as a professional institution with global standards in treasury and risk management to give effect to enforcing the Public Finance Management Act (PFMA).
The new Finance Minister attended Achimota School. He received a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Degree in Economics from Columbia University in New York and a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from the Yale School of Management.
He was a Co-Founder and former Executive Chairman of the Databank Group, a premier investment banking firm in Ghana.
Prior to co-founding Databank in 1990, the Minister was an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and Salomon Brothers on Wall Street in New York.
He brings to the Ministry of Finance more than 30 years’ experience in the Ghanaian and international financial sector-with over the past 25-years of experience in Insurance, Retail Banking, Private Equity, Pharmaceuticals and Real Estate, since his return from New York to Ghana.
Source: ISD (G.D. Zaney)
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