By
Felix Engsalige Nyaaba
The 42 years old
businesswoman and her son, who were arrested sometime in February, last year, for distributing substandard electrical cables fixed with fake labels of a reputable
electrical cable manufacturing
company in Tema to unsuspecting
customers in the country was last Friday convicted and sentenced to 62 days in imprisonment
with hard labour.
Madam Evelyn Mingle,
manageress of Panaabs Electricals shop at McCarthy Hill Junction, on the Kasoa Road
in the Central Region, was convicted on three counts of conspiracy to commit
crime, forgery of trademarks and defrauding by false pretence by the Jamestown District
Magistrate Court in Accra.
The sentence is to run concurrently.
The presiding
Magistrate, Mrs. Afi Agbanu Kudomor ,
however, sentence her accomplice, Daniel Owusu, who is her son, on same counts to 50 penalty unit (GHC600.00) or in default he would serve 12 months in imprisonment.
The two convicts went through a full trial and the
court on Friday found them guilty on the crime of conspiracy to forge the logo
of Nexans Kabelmetal which they had fixed on some low quality foreign cables and
passed them off as genuine wires from Nexans Kabelmetal to unsuspecting buyers
and also for defrauding one Kofi Tawiah Maafo, with the pretext of supplying
him with genuine wires from Nexans Kabelmetals Limited.
Delivering her judgment, the presiding Magistrate held that the convicts stood out as persons
who were primed to illegally take control of the electrical business in the country with their illegal activities and to deprive the local
Electrical industries and companies from getting their daily bread.
She said, the court took into consideration of the
impeccable and excellent manner of evidence given by the complainant and the style
in which the convicts perpetrate the crime, the evidence provided by the prosecutor
in court, among other things before imposing the sentence.
The presiding Magistrate emphasized in her ruling which lasted 25
minutes 47 seconds that the sentence would send a clear signal to persons like
that of the convicts whose business is to kill the local industries and better their
lots.
She said, the courts would not take such action kindly
and that the sentence was to further serve as a deterrent to others who are
doing similar things undetected in the country.
The magistrate who cited some law authorities as
precedence before handing over the sentences said, the ‘agent provocateur’ and the police
investigator who went undercover to investigate the crime has done an excellent
work.
She said, the investigator acted under an ‘agent provocateur,’
has acted to ascertain the authenticity of the complainant claims against the convicts
at the time and the action was to serve for the interest of the nation.
She however concludes that, the prosecution has been
able to prove the guilty of the convicts beyond reasonable doubt and that a
prema-facie case has been dully proved the guilty of the mindset of the convicts.
The prosecution case was that, Mr. Kofi Tawia Maafo,
one of the complainants went to the convicts shop to buy Nexans Kabelmetal
cables to wire his house.
When he went there, Madam Mingle gave him two invoices,
for genuine Nexnas Kabelmetals and ones that she referred to us British cables.
But Mr. Maafo told the convicts he was interested
for the genuine Nexans cables and they agreed on a price.
According to the prosecutor, after paying the agreed
amount, the convict gave him a receipt and supplied him with the cables which
she claimed were genuine ones, but when the complainant got home, his
electrician detected that 12 out of the cables were of Reroy cables but in
Nexans kabelmetal labels.
It was there and then that the complainant realized
that the labels on the cables were forged and the wires too were fake.
When he informed the convict that the cables were
fake, she refused to collect or replace them for him, so he was therefore
compelled to report the matter to the management of Nexans Kabelmetal Limited.
The prosecutor, Chief Inspector Owusu noted that,
the Nexans Kabelmetal Limited then replaced the cables for Mr. Maafo and later
reported the case to the police for investigation.
He said whilst
investigation was still ongoing, an ‘agent provocateur’ also bought 75 piece of the Nexans cables
from the convicts shop at McCarthy Hills and
paid for them.
The investigator then sent another witness in the case to
collect them but after collecting them, he detected that all but one cable had
a forged tags and only two of the 75 cables were genuine.
The prosecutor noted that when the convict’s
storeroom was searched, about hundred boxes of empty Reroy and British were
found in there.
He said, some of the labels were taken to the
quality control department of the company for further inspection, and it was
detected that the tags labels were faded
and appeared to be scanned and did not come from the Nexans Kabelmetal company.
He said as a result the convicts were arrested and
charged with the offence.
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