Dismiss Sky Train Case – Defence Lawyers Urge Court

Lawyers for Solomon Asamoah and Professor Christopher Ameyaw-Akumfi, the two accused persons in the Sky Train trial — the Republic v. Solomon Asamoah and Professor Christopher Ameyaw-Akumfi — say the prosecution has not presented enough evidence to require their clients to answer the charges. They have therefore asked the High Court to dismiss the case.

Their applications, known as submissions of no case, were filed ahead of the 11 June 2026 sitting: a 96-page brief by Victoria Barth, lawyer for Mr. Asamoah, the 1st accused, and a 30-page brief by Yaw Acheampong Boafo, lawyer for Professor Ameyaw-Akumfi, the 2nd accused.

At this stage, the court is not deciding guilt or innocence. The question is narrower: whether the State has produced credible evidence requiring the defence to respond.

The six charges arise from one transaction: a US$2 million payment made in 2019 by the Ghana Infrastructure Investment Fund (GIIF) for an equity stake in the project development company.

The company was owned by sponsors selected by the Ministry of Railways to develop and build the Accra Sky Train. The State now says the payment was made without board approval for a rail system that was never built and that the investment was therefore lost, amounting to causing financial loss to the Republic and dissipating public funds, with the two men accused of conspiring to do so.

To prove its case, the prosecution called three witnesses: former GIIF board members Yaw Odame-Darkwa and Kofi Boakye, and lead investigator Francis Aboagye. The Attorney-General has yet to file the prosecution’s reply, which the court has scheduled for later this month.

In response, the defence frames the case around three points: the money was invested in an equity stake in the project company, the investment was approved by the GIIF Board, and the project stalled for reasons outside the accused persons’ control.

Defence says the US$2 million bought shares, not construction

The prosecution case is often reduced to one question: if government funds were spent on a rail system that was never built, where is the money? The defence says the answer is already on the court record.
According to the defence, the US$2 million was never meant to build the rail line, which was estimated to cost about US$2.6 billion and was not GIIF’s responsibility. Instead, the payment bought an equity stake in the project company.

The defence points to unchallenged documents, including the certificate of incorporation, the directors’ resolution, the share transfer form, and GIIF’s own share certificate. It also says the prosecution accepts that the payment was in consideration for shares.

Ms. Barth then makes a practical point: a buyer cannot purchase an asset and keep the purchase price as well. Once GIIF paid for the shares, she argues, the money belonged to the seller, just as it would in the purchase of a car or a house.

To demand that the accused now “account for” that same money, the defence says, misunderstands the transaction. GIIF “could not eat its cake and have it.”

Audits treated the investment as recoverable, defence argues

Having argued that the payment bought shares, the defence next disputes the claim that the investment was lost. It says the State’s own evidence shows otherwise. The lead investigator relied on a “net liability” recorded in 2020 as proof that the money was gone. But the defence says a net liability is an accounting position, not proof of loss, and notes that the Auditor-General neither reached that conclusion nor wrote off the investment.

Instead, he recommended that GIIF monitor the investment and provide for it only if it later proved unrecoverable. Deloitte’s 2023 audit, the defence says, reached a similar position, stating that the investment “may not be recoverable if” the project failed to secure approvals.

Would reputable auditors, the defence asks, tell GIIF to keep monitoring money that was already gone?

The defence adds that the Sky Train project, for which the investment was made, remains relevant and has not been abandoned as a public infrastructure objective.

The defence also says the project was delayed by COVID-19, not by anything the accused did. It points to the timeline: the Concession Agreement between the Ministry of Railways Development and the project company was signed in November 2019, and about three months later Ghana, like much of the world, entered lockdown with international financing sharply contracting.

The defence argues that these unforeseen events made it impossible for the project to move forward and legally broke any link between the accused and its failure to progress.

It adds that in 2021, as the pandemic weakened the economy, a new Minister of Railways Development suspended government support for the project until conditions improved.

Board records are central to the approval argument

On the central allegation, that the deal lacked approval, the defence says the documents are decisive. The board minutes of 24 October 2018 record the board approving the US$2 million investment while rejecting two other proposals at the same meeting, showing, the defence argues, that the board could decline a proposal when it chose to.

Signed minutes are presumed accurate in law unless disproved, and these minutes were adopted without objection at the time. The project was also repeatedly recorded in GIIF’s documents as “existing” and “approved.”

The investment appears in GIIF’s audited financial statements, which were signed by every board member as reflecting the company’s true position before being submitted to the Auditor-General, the Ministry of Finance, and Parliament, GIIF’s supervisory bodies. None of the auditors — PwC, Deloitte, or the Auditor-General — opined that the investment was not duly approved by the GIIF Board.

The defence further notes that the prosecution produced zero evidence that any board member questioned the project’s approval at any point between the 2018 investment decision and the board members’ 2025 statement at the NIB that they were unaware of the investment. It says that denial became the basis for their change from “suspect” to “prosecution witnesses”.

Defence rejects claim of conspiracy or collusion

From there, the defence turns to the conspiracy charge, saying there is no evidence of a secret agreement to loot public funds, and the prosecution failed to even attempt to provide any such evidence.

Instead, it says every step of the transaction was recorded, audited, and reported. It also points out that the prosecution chose not to call the GIIF officials who actually processed the payment.

“The transaction was undertaken transparently, within institutional structures, documented in official records, and subjected to audit,” Ms. Barth concluded. “Such conduct is wholly inconsistent with any suggestion of conspiracy or dissipation.”

For the second accused, Mr. Acheampong Boafo similarly argued that the evidence was “so manifestly unreliable that no reasonable tribunal could safely convict.”

Witness evidence, according to the defence, weakened the State’s case

The defence says the witness evidence created further problems for the prosecution by contradicting the records, one another, and itself. Mr. Odame-Darkwa, who was Chair of the Audit Committee, swore that the project came up at only one meeting, but later accepted that he had been shown at least eight sets of minutes mentioning it.

He also admitted that he had signed audited accounts listing the very payment he claimed not to know about. Mr. Boakye who authored and signed the minutes as Corporate Secretary, under cross-examination moved from “no approval” to “no final approval” to “some form of approval,” and back again.

The lead investigator, Mr. Francis Aboagye, admitted that he had never seen what a valid GIIF approval looked like, yet concluded that this one was missing, without comparing it with the approval documents of other approved projects. He also conceded that some key claims were based on his own assumptions: “I might have inferred.”

After the two board members testified, the five remaining former board members who had earlier made statements against the accused were not called by the prosecution to take the stand to defend those statements or face cross-examination.

What the defence is asking the court to do

Against that background, lawyers for both accused persons are asking the court to acquit and discharge their clients, arguing that there is no incontrovertible evidence to secure a conviction and no sufficient basis to require the defence to open its case.

The Attorney-General is expected to respond by 24 June 2026, and the court will reconvene on 25 June to fix a date for its ruling on whether the case should proceed.