Adongo to Akufo-Addo: “Stop attacking rating agencies; they haven’t done anything wrong”

President Akufo-Addo has come under fire for criticising rating agencies from Isaac Adongo, the Deputy Ranking Member of the Financial Committee in Parliament.

According to the member of parliament for Bolgatanga Central, borrowing from wealthy nations is significantly influenced by these international rating agencies’ ratings.

Isaac Adongo went on to say that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was dishonest because he benefited from having good financial ratings but couldn’t stand it when the same organisations gave him negative ratings even if their conclusions were accurate.

“You see the dishonesty, were we working together to deceive the investors when the rating agencies gave us high ratings and we were going to the capital markets and displaying them Ghana’s rating and collecting the $3 billion? What claims made by the rating agencies are untrue?

“They ought to make it clear to that man [Akufo-Addo] that rating is not a diplomatic ploy and that he should quit circling his colleagues and feeding them bogus tales. The rating agencies and the capital market precede his own life and are now acknowledged as being a component of the world’s financial system. It has benefited him,” Adongo declared.

Amid the 30th Africa Export and Import Bank annual meetings, President Akufo-Addo criticised rating agencies for their “reckless” downgrading of African economies amid the COVID-19 epidemic and the crisis in Russia and Ukraine.

He stated that as a result of these downgrades, certain nations, most notably Ghana, have been excluded from the global capital market.

As the AU’s champion for African financial institutions and the head of a nation that recently experienced one of its most trying post-independence periods, I can say this with confidence and authority. Ghana’s liquidity crisis was made worse by the rating agencies’ careless behaviour, which resulted in pro-cyclical downgrades that shut Ghana off from capital markets and turned it into a solvency crisis.

Akufo-Addo remarked in his remarks at the 30th annual meetings of Afreximbank, “The country which had become the beloved child of bondholders, and had successfully gone to market during the height of the pre-Covid crisis was abruptly shut out of international financial markets.