The Office of the Special Prosecutor has hit a snag in its bid to arrest Charles Bissue, the former secretary of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Small Scale Mining, after the Human Rights Division of the Accra High Court granted a request by Charles Bissue for an interlocutory injunction on the arrest warrant issued against him by the OSP and its agents.
The order is effective for 10 days, and the hearing has been set for June 22, 2023. On Tuesday, June 13,. Charles Bissue, formerly the Secretary of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM), was declared a “wanted” person by the Office of the Special Prosecutor.
Mr. Bissue has now filed a writ at the High Court in Accra to try to stop his prosecution by the OSP. This lawsuit was filed in response to the Special Prosecutor’s probe into allegations of corruption leveled by the IMCIM Chairman Prof. Kwabena Frimpong Boateng.
The Court has further restrained the Special Prosecutor from seeking additional arrest warrants while the substantive matter is still being decided, as well as posting statements claiming the applicant is wanted.
Investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas and his Tiger Eye Pi team exposed Charles Bissue for accepting bribes for allowing galamsey, a form of unlawful mining.
The footage revealed that Bissue was allegedly helping a company get mining permission by going outside the proper channels.
In the video, he is shown accepting bundles of cash from a mining company in exchange of speeding the ‘clearing’ of the company so that it can begin mining as soon as possible. He is also heard giving instructions to his colleagues over the phone to “fast-track” the completion of the company’s documentation.
Mr. Bissue, however, has denied the claims made about him in the documentary. Meanwhile, in July 2019, Mr. Bissue was cleared of any wrongdoing or allegations of corruption by the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service.
According to the CID’s investigation, the documentary’s depiction of events between Mr. Bissue and Yaw Ben of ORR Resource Enterprise was inaccurate.
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