Attorney General and Minister for Justice, Godfred Yeboah Dame has assured customers of embattled Menzgold that justice would be served.

According to him, he is happy to state that after painstaking investigations, criminal prosecution has commenced against the perpetrators of the gold scam adding that at least by the Grace of God the victims would be served justice.

The Attorney General made the pledge when addressing the gathering at the 40th Cambridge International Sympo­sium on Economic Crime, organised at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.

Recounting how the whole scam happened, Godfred Dame said, it started as an amorphous organisation operating a microfinance institution under the guise of gold trading, legally using the name of a bank.

He said it called itself Menzbanc and metamorphosed into other names before eventually changing to Menzgold.

As a result, he said they dealt in the purchase and deposit of gold collectables from the public and issued contracts with guaranteed returns to clients without a licence from relevant authorities.

The modus operandi of the company according to the AG, highlighted some of the major causes for the success of such fraudsters, ignorance, vulnerability and greed of the victims.

He went further to say that this vulnerability and ignorance of thousands of otherwise hard-working Ghanaians was the oxygen of the operation of the company as it is often witnessed in the cases of Ponzi schemes around the world.

Godfred Dame said people pay their life savings to the suspects in the case resulting in losses worth millions of dollars and in some cases loss of lives.

The misery and distress, according to him, caused many homes and nearly unleashed a social crisis as riots and demonstrations broke out on the streets of Accra and other parts of the country, adding that in reality, people lost their homes and some marriages broke up.

The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Godfred Yeboah Dame, has filed 39 counts of fresh criminal charges at the High Court against embattled Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Menzgold Ghana Company Limited, Nana Appiah Mensah, popularly known as NAM 1.

This comes after more than 36 appearances without a trial over three years, 11 months by the accused person at the Circuit Court pending the Attorney-General’s advice.

By Edem Mensah-Tsotorme