Cecilia Abena Dapaah, a former sanitation minister in Ghana who resigned over the weekend, was detained on suspicion of corruption after she reported a cash theft from her home.
The court charge sheet related to the people accused of the theft stated that Cecilia Abena Dapaah had a sizeable amount of money stolen, including an enormous amount of foreign currency, according to The BBC.
The court charge sheet describes a "cash sum" of $1 million, as well as 300,000 euros and 350,000 Ghana cedis ($30,000), plus other personal items including handbags valued at $35,000 and $95,000 worth of jewellery. The 68-year-old disputes the figures given in the court document, but the revelations outraged many in Ghana, the news outlet further reported.
The media reports on this huge amount of money allegedly stolen from Dapaah's home sparked outrage against the minister on social media and calls for her resignation.
Many questioned the origins of such sums of cash in a country where some members of President Nana Akufo-Addo's government have been embroiled in corruption scandals.
However, Ms Dapaah resigned as minister of sanitation and water resources, a post she had held for the last five years.
"Whereas I can state emphatically that those figures do not represent correctly what my husband and I reported to the police, I am very much aware of the import of such stories around someone in my position," Dapaah said in her resignation letter.
"I do not want this matter to become a preoccupation of the government," she said, adding that she would "no doubt" be exonerated.
The presidency accepted Dapaah's resignation and lauded her work without commenting on the allegations.
Dapaah was appointed minister of sanitation and water resources when Akufo-Addo took power in 2017 and retained it when he was re-elected in 2021. The president has vowed to crack down on corruption.
(With inputs from Reuters)
