As part of efforts to reform the arbitration environment in Ghana, the Attorney General and the Minister of Justice Godfred Yeboah Dame says the government is taking steps to ensure that most international arbitrations involving Ghana take place in the country and are regulated by Ghanaian law.

“Thus, I will present to Cabinet in the next few days, as part of the processes for the passage into law, an amendment to the State (Property and Contracts) Act, 1960 (CA 4), to mandate all contracts involving the State and its agencies as parties, to not only stipulate Ghana law as the governing law but also to have Ghana as the seat of arbitration and with the ADR Centre in Accra being the venue for the arbitration.”

“With this amendment, the practice whereby the State and Ghanaian lawyers travel to various jurisdictions – Paris, New York, London, Singapore, etc. for the conduct of arbitration involving the Government of Ghana and where arbitral awards are enforced all over the world at enormous cost to the State will cease and will be consigned to history,” Mr Dame said in his address at the conference of the Ghana Bar Association in Kumasi on Monday.

He further noted that an important piece of legislation introduced recently which seeks to reduce unnecessary cost to the taxpayer is the Contracts (Amendment) Act, 2023 (Act 1114), by which public officers are prohibited from entering into a contract on behalf of the State in which the rate of interest is stipulated as compound interest.