550 Bags Of Cocoa Vanish

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Category: NewsBrief

Created on Thursday, 30 June 2011 00:00

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550 Bags Of Cocoa Vanish

A truck loaded with 550 bags of dried cocoa beans worth GH¢111,000 has mysteriously gone missing while it was in transit to the Takoradi Port.

The truck, with registration number GR 587 V and driven by one Kwadwo Asamoah, loaded the beans at the Dunkwa and Wassa Akropong depots of Olam Ghana Limited, a produce buying company, but had not reached its destination, the Commodity Village at Apowa, near Takoradi, as of the time this report was being filed.

This is the second time in a month that such an incident has occurred.

Last month, armed men attacked a Mercedes Benz truck, with registration number WR 8784 C, loaded with cocoa on its way to Takoradi, after crossing the truck with a taxi.

The robbers blindfolded the driver of the truck and his mate, took them to an illegal mining site in the bush and asked them not to move or they would kill them.

The robbers also collected mobile phones from the driver and his mate.

The driver of the current missing truck is being sought after by the police.

According to the police, the driver had been confirmed by the transporter as an employee of Olam Ghana Limited.

When contacted, the Head of the Public Relations Unit of the Ghana Cocoa Board (COCOBOD), Mr Noah Amenya, expressed worry about the rampant cases of stolen cocoa beans which had already been graded by the Quality Control Division.

He said it was difficult to divert cocoa which had been certified by COCOBOD and attributed the current happenings to a syndicate which he said the board was devising ways to curb.

Mr Amenya said the board was in the process of introducing a tracker devise which would monitor haulage trucks until they got to their final destination.

Asked if the cocoa already checked by COCOBOD’s Quality Control Division and the figure fed into the system would not create contradiction on how much cocoa the country was really producing, he replied in the negative, saying its officers had fed the system with the figure.

Officials of the Dunkwa and Wassa Akropong depots of Olam Ghana Limited and the police said they had launched a serious search for the cocoa, the driver and the truck.

Source: The Daily Graphic/Ghana