How Ghana's Embassy in Washington Extorted $19.3 Million From Visa Applicants

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration

According to the Auditor-General's forensic audit, an embassy IT staffer created unauthorised private websites linked to the embassy's official systems. Applicants seeking visa and passport services were quietly redirected away from Ghana's legitimate consular platforms including the Electronic Consular Information Management System (eCIMS) and AppTrack to these parallel private sites, where they were charged extra fees the Foreign Ministry never approved.

The audit even found that the embassy's official website source code had been altered to enable the redirection, meaning applicants had no visible way of knowing they'd left the government's system at all.

The largest single component of the illicit fees came from mailing and dispatch charges. In 2023, the embassy stopped allowing applicants to use self-addressed return envelopes the normal way to cover document return postage yourself and instead made everyone pay a fixed mailing fee, regardless of what the actual postage cost. The audit traced irregular transactions across several categories: dispatch and mailing charges from 2019–2025, "application support services" from 2021–2025, extra merchant fees tacked onto online payments from 2020–2025, and transactions tied specifically to a company called STEFRANN LLC and an individual named Fred Kwarteng, dating back to 2019–2020.

Individually, the extra charges look small reports put the unapproved fees at roughly $29.75 to $60 per applicant. Multiplied across thousands of applicants over six years, that's how the total climbed to nearly $19.4 million.

Fred Kwarteng, a locally recruited IT staffer hired at the embassy in August 2017, has been named as the central figure. According to Foreign Affairs Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Kwarteng used a privately owned company, Ghana Travel Consultants (GTC), to collect the redirected fees and admitted, upon questioning, to keeping the proceeds in his own private account.

But the audit and subsequent reporting suggest this wasn't a lone-wolf operation for its entire six-year run, nor was it undetected the whole time. A National Investigations Bureau source told The Africa Report that an internal embassy investigation into Kwarteng actually took place as early as 2020–2021, with a detailed report reaching the heads of Chancery and Consular Services at the time and that nothing was done about it. The audit also names a former ambassador who reportedly signed a contract that formalised the arrangement, pointing to potential complicity well above IT-staffer level.

Embassy of the United States

The scandal became public when Ghana temporarily shut down the Washington embassy on May 26, 2025, after US authorities and Ghanaian officials were alerted. Ablakwa announced Kwarteng's immediate dismissal, recalled all Foreign Affairs Ministry staff posted to Washington back to Accra, dissolved the embassy's IT department entirely, and suspended all locally recruited staff pending investigation. The matter was referred to Ghana's Attorney-General for possible prosecution, with officials stating that all illicitly obtained funds would be pursued for recovery.

Hon. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa

Given that the alleged proceeds were collected and likely moved through the US financial system, Ablakwa suggested at the time that the case could fall under American federal jurisdiction too potentially even triggering the US Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which targets long-running coordinated criminal schemes. He called for US authorities to "follow the money, freeze the assets and extradite if necessary."