An Accra High Court has adjourned a trial involving Dram Oil and Trading Limited and Deloitte and Touche after lawyers for Deloitte raised objections to certain paragraphs of the Witness Statement of Dram’s first witness.
Counsel for Deloitte, Mr Ace Ankomah, raised objections and asked the court to strike out some twenty paragraphs in the Witness Statement.
He said the narrations in those paragraphs were not formally stated in the initial court documents filed by
Dram’s lawyers.
Lawyers for Dram Oil & Trading Limited, led by Gaspar Lyle Nii-Aponsah, had begun submitting legal arguments against the objections raised by lawyers when the case was adjourned to October 2025.
The case at the Commercial Division of the High Court centres on a multi-million-dollar petroleum transaction involving under-recovery payments owed to Dram.
According to the lawyers, Deloitte was appointed by the court to audit the books of Vihama Energy Limited, the second defendant, following a Judgment that under-recoveries received and withheld by Vihama Energy rightfully belonged to Dram.
However, Dram claimed that Deloitte’s conduct during the audit process undermined its neutrality, fairness and professional standards and caused injury to Dram.
The globally renowned audit firm now faces, at the trial, the hurdle of battling accusations of producing a misleading, procedurally flawed and grossly negligent audit report in its court-appointed role after the Court Judgment had already settled those issues in favour of Dram.
This thereby overturns the effect of the very Court Judgment which ordered the appointment of Deloitte to compute various sums that the Judgment had held Dram was entitled to which Vihama alledgedly withheld raising serious questions about audit independence, fairness, and professional accountability.
Lawyers for Dram strongly opposed lawyers for Deloitte’s move to strike out sections of the Witness Statement of their first witness.
They argued that all the challenged evidence was based on clearly pleaded facts and that Deloitte’s objections were not only unfounded but also revealed discomfort with scrutiny of its conduct.
Dram’s lawyers stated that their court filings specifically alleged that Deloitte’s audit relied on a fabricated “January 2012” cargo sale date, despite factual and documentary evidence already pleaded showing sales commenced in March 2012.
They said the Witness Statement described a prior auditor who was unable to complete the engagement, a
statement appearing in the pleadings of Dram and which was directly denied in Deloitte’s defence.
They alleged Deloitte revised its audit report at least three times, with two earlier draft reports with the Court Judgment that Vihama was indebted to Dram.
They claimed its final version, which for the first time stated that Dram was rather indebted to Vihama Energy and conflicted with the findings in the Judgment that appointed it and therefore adverse to Dram was filed in court the next day without giving Dram the opportunity to respond.
They said that despite earlier drafts (which favoured Dram) being shared with other parties for comment over several months.
The lawyers alleged that a senior Deloitte partner informed Dram’s financiers that Dram was expected to receive a positive balance from the audit, but subsequently reversed this position in the final filed version, a representation directly supported by email and telephone correspondence that had already been pleaded.
“Dram’s obligation to pay Deloitte’s audit fees, as stated in the Engagement Letter and pleaded in the Statement of Claim, confirms that Deloitte was engaged directly by Dram and owed it a duty of care, which Deloitte denies,” they added.
In their arguments, the lawyers relied on authorities from Ghana and England to demonstrate that witness statements are expressly permitted to provide details, flesh and context beyond what is contained in the pleadings, which were required to be stated in summary form.
The High Court has adjourned the matter to October 2025 to allow for the continuation of the legal arguments on the objections to the paragraphs in the Witness Statement before trial commences.
Source: GNA
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