The Africa Center Energy Policy (ACEP) has indicated that the response of Hubtel to comments from the media and CSOs on the controversial ECG PowerApp contract rather reinforces their stance.
ACEP in a statement dated 19th September 2024 captioned “ECG “Galamsey” on Ghana’s Budget Reaches Reaches a Crescendo” pointed out some discrepancies in the claims of both Hubtel and ECG on the ECG PowerApp contract.
“According to a contract received from ECG, the total cost for the design and development of the platform is about GH¢171.8 million. Between November 2022 and December 2023, the cumulative service charge was over GHS100 million. In addition, Hubtel will be paid 0.95% of all revenues collected as service charges. At the time of contract execution, GH¢75 million had been paid to Hubtel on the framework cost. This information in the contract contradicts information Hubtel has communicated on its proceeds from the agreement. On March 28th, 2024, eight days after the contract was executed, Hubtel published the cost of developing the payment system at US$25 million (GH¢315 million), of which US$12 million (GH¢151 million) had been paid,” portions of the energy CSO’s statement read.
Based on the contradictory claims, ACEP called for an urgent audit of the Hubtel contract and verification of all the payments made to the company to ascertain value for money for the country while clarifying discrepancies in cash values reported by Hubtel and ECG.
Hubtel in response to the commentary on the contract contended that most of the comments from media commentators and CSOs are false.
“Some of these false statements seem to be designed to totally discredit the work Hubtel has done in the recent transformation and record-breaking achievements in ECG’s revenue collection and commercial operations,” Hubtel wrote in their response.
But speaking in an interview with The High Street Journal, Policy Lead for Petroleum & Conventional Energy, Justice Kodzo Yaotse maintained that Hubtel’s response rather enforces ACEP’s stance insisting that there are no major disagreements in the two statements.
According to the Policy Lead, he is not sure Hubtel was directly responding to the claims of ACEP given that the company rather rehashed their claims.
“We have seen the statement from Hubtel, I don’t think there are any vast disagreements between what we have stated and what they have put out. Unless of course, they are responding to some other statements which are not from ACEP,” he told The High Street Journal.
Citing portions of Hubtel’s to buttress his point, he noted that, “, nowhere in our statement did we indicate Hubtel has been paid US$25. In fact we indicated that Hubtel published on their own website somewhere in March 2024 that the cost of developing the payment system was US$25 million of which US$12 million has been paid. And that is still repeated in their statement so unless they are responding to somebody else, then that is fine.”
He continued, “they also indicated that there are claims that Hubtel gets 3% [of every unit purchased by customers of ECG]. We have done the breakdown based on what they have reported; the 0.95% of total revenue as charges and all of those things, and none of that amounts to 3%. Nowhere have we stated that they are given 3%. “
However, the point of disagreement between ACEP and Hubtel based on the company’s response is the purported impact of the platform on ECG’s revenue performance.
According to Kodzo Yaotse, Hubtel rather overstated the impact of its intervention on ECG’s revenue performance insisting that at best, their impact is marginal.
“We disagree with the statement that they are making that revenues have gone up by over 210% as a result of work being done by Hubtel and the new commercial system provider especially when you look at the fact that tariffs have increased by over 80%. They tried to give a discount of the impact of that but is something that we disagree with. We feel that their impact is at best marginal,” he argued.
He therefore concluded that “the rest of things are not things that have been mentioned in our statement.”
