Former Sanitation and Water Resources Minister Cecilia Dapaah’s lawyers have given the Multimedia Group three days to retract what they believe to be untrue reports about their client.
The attorneys claim in the aforementioned letter that Multimedia, via its JoyNews channel, misreported information regarding a petition submitted by the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) to the High Court, Financial Division.
They assert that despite the fact that no specific dollar amounts were mentioned in the Application, JoyNews published information about the allegedly found amounts while attributing these details to unnamed sources.
In a report titled “OSP tracks $5 million, finds GH48 million in Cecilia Dapaah’s Prudential Bank accounts,” JoyNews claimed that its sources at the OSP had disclosed the amounts of money in the frozen bank accounts as well as other money that had been discovered in another account. This is in accordance with the letter. On August 10, around 12:30 pm.
According to the attorneys, JoyNews published a number of stories on YouTube at around 2:00 p.m. on the same day with the titles “Joy News Prime Cecilia Dapaah Case: OSP tracks $5 million in total bank transactions over a period” and “JoyNews Today OSP finds $5 million and GH48 million in Cecilia Dapaah’s bank accounts.”
The Minister’s attorneys contend that in addition to the OSP failing to disclose any funds discovered in their client’s accounts, the claim that these accounts contain $5 million and GH48 million is untrue.
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They also point out that JoyNews continued to publish content referencing the false claims that $5 million and GH48 million had been discovered in the Minister’s bank accounts, despite the OSP having refuted and refuted claims that it had revealed any specific amounts of money found in the bank accounts of their client in a post made on one of its verified social media handles (Office of the Special Prosecutor-Ghana, @ospghana) at around 4pm on the same day.
They draw the conclusion that Multimedia’s reporting is based on this development, which; “purported reliance on information from unidentified sources and a reckless disregard for truth and accuracy,” and “actuated by malice and a deliberate/reckless attempt to impute wrongdoing to our client contrary to the constitutional and time-honoured principle of the presumption of innocence she is legally entitled to.”
The letter demands a retraction and apology within three days or threatens legal action against the media outlet by emphasizing that published figures about the amounts in Madam Dapaah’s bank accounts are false.
