Special Prosecutor nominee Kissi Agyebeng has said neither is he a surrogate of the botched Agyapa deal as alleged by his predecessor Martin Amidu nor will he compromise his office as a result of his relationships.

Mr Agyebeng told parliament’s Appointments Commiittee on Thursday, 22 July 2021 during his vetting that: “I wasn’t involved in the deal. I was nowhere near it. Indeed, until it started coming up, I didn’t even know what it was”.

According to him, “whoever says I am a surrogate of a law firm or implicates me in the Agyapa transaction clearly does not know me because if you know me, you wouldn’t make such allegations”.

“All these things that came up, I took them as coming from uninformed positions because I was not involved in the Agyapa transaction in any form or manner.”

Mr Amidu had said in a harangue that Mr Agyebeng’s closeness to Attorney General Godfred Dame and President Nana Akufo-Addo’s cousin, Mr Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, who owns Accra-based Asaase Radio and also co-founder of Africa Legal Associates, a law firm involved in the controversial Agyapa Royalties deal, would undermine his independence.

“Asaase Radio should also have told the Ghanaian and international public that its surrogate and nominee Special Prosecutor in the published letter is a personal friend and classmate of the Attorney General, and the owner of Asaase Radio, all of whom attended the University of Ghana’s Faculty of Law, and Ghana Law School”, Mr Amidu wrote.

“Asaase Radio and the nominator of the proposed new Special Prosecutor know or ought to have known the extent of the involvement of their surrogate as a lawyer for suspects in pending suspected corruption cases in which the government showed an undue interest in the Office of the Special Prosecutor, which I await to see how independently and impartially those cases will be handled to the conclusion should the President submit the name of the nominee to Parliament, he is approved, and then appointed,” Mr Amidu added.

Mr Agyebeng, however, told the committee: “As for relationships, the fact that I was so close to you at some point in our lives would not give you the free pass because of that relationship”.

“If there is a matter, I’m not going to say because I know one person or the other, I’m going to give the person a free pass”.

“I’m certainly going to investigate, but the truth of the matter ought to be told.”

“For the record, that is the truth, and so I am no one’s surrogate. I am my own man, and I prefer to wear my own shoes”, he noted.