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President John Dramani Mahama over the weekend threw an open challenge daring people who perceive his government to be corrupt, to name the individuals in such practices but in an apparent riposte, civil society group OccupyGhana says the President should look within the Flagstaff House and he would realize that the Smarttys bus branding scandal “was cooked up with the Office Of The President (OOTP)”.

After taking due note of the President's invitation to Ghanaians to name for him, persons in his government who were corrupt, so that he dealt with them OccupyGhana in a short message posted its official facebook page said “thank you, Sir. Let's start with the Smarttys transaction. In this official letter, no less a person than the Ministry of Transport's Director of Policy & Planning (who also signed the final Contract, by the way), felt the need to inform and assure Smarttys that what we now know to be the corrupt Smarttys transaction, was cooked up with the Office Of The President (OOTP).

"And so while we may not mention names at this stage, right there in the Flagstaff House, the OOTP,  are persons who are implicated and complicit in this blatant act of corruption and shameless illegality. We are pretty certain that the Director who signed this official letter and who mentioned the OOTP, is well able to provide the names of the persons in the OOTP and exactly what role(s) they played in this impugned transaction”, the group added.

Meanwhile, the group says it is heading back to Court to challenge the Attorney-General's refusal to release a document on the ₵3.6m controversial bus branding deal.

A leading member of the pressure group, Ace Ankomah says the document contains the A-G’s recommendation that some key officials involved in the deal be prosecuted.

After initially declining disclosure, the A-G’s department caved in to pressure from legal actions demanding the release of all documents relating to the branding of 116 public buses. All the documents, except one, have been released.

Already, the documents released by the A-G revealed that the decision to hand Smarttys, a contract to brand 116 buses for ₵3.6m was an “extremely corrupt transaction”.

Even before the 15th July 2015 letter from the Transport Ministry inviting Smarttys to submit quotations for branding the buses, the buses had already been branded by the same company.

The Transport Ministry was only doing the paperwork to legitimize the illegal deal after the fact, the documents show. The Transport Ministry had also written to the Public Procurement Authority requesting that it approved Smarttys as the company solely sourced for the branding buses.

Ace Ankomah said if the PPA had done basic checks such as inspecting the buses to be branded, it would have clearly known that the deed had been done.

“…it would have discovered that the Ministry was lying and that the branding had been concluded, illegally” Ace Ankomah said on facebook.

The lawyer also said a simple check on the prices quoted by Smarttys would have established that the contract sum had been inflated. Yet the PPA says it did a “thorough job” in approving the request.

OccupyGhana says the last jigsaw to the puzzle is the set of actions recommended by the Attorney-General including the prosecution of officials.

These actions contained in a separate document was not released to the pressure group which is hungry for more details.

It will not hesitate to go to court to compel the Attorney-General to release this document it deems vital, the lawyer signaled.

According to Ace Ankomah, although it does not have a copy of the A-G’s recommendation, it has knowledge that the A-G had pushed for the prosecution of top government officials at the Transport Ministry and Public Procurement Authority.