Former Member of Parliament (MP) for the Manso Nkwanta constituency, Joseph Albert Qualm, has filed a defamation lawsuit against Professor Kwabena Frimpong-Boateng, a former head of the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Illegal Mining (IMCIM).
Mr. Qualm is suing the former Minister of Environment, Science, Technology, and Innovation for GH2.5 million in damages and a restraining order barring Prof. Frimpong-Boateng from commenting further on the report he wrote about Galamsey.
In the report leaked to the public, Prof. Frimpong-Boateng claimed, among other things, that the former MP had benefited from his membership on the board of the Minerals Commission by acquiring many mining concessions.
According to Professor Fimpong-Boateng’s report, Mr Qualm would typically “sell these concessions to private individuals, including party members, for two hundred thousand cedis per concession.”
This incensed the party, and in the 2020 elections to choose a candidate, the electorate rejected Mr Quarm, the incumbent MP who had more resources than the other candidates. He was accused of trying to bribe delegates and ‘camping’ them, but he lost to a less well-known person who lacked any financial muscle.
Mr Qualm requests that the court rule “that the Defendant’s averments in his report which alleged underhanded sales of mining concessions to the Plaintiff is capable of a defamatory meaning and are actually defamatory of the Plaintiff.”
In addition, he is requesting an “injunction restraining the Defendant, his servants, or agents, or otherwise, from further publishing or causing to be published any portion of the Defendant’s report so long as they relate to the allegations made against the Plaintiff; and to further restrain the publication or repetition of the said or similar words defamatory of the Plaintiff through media interviews and other such by the Defendant.”
