BERNARD A. ALLOTEY v. ELECTRICITY COMPANY LTD.

PROF. MENSA-BONSU (MRS.) JSC:-

This is an appeal against the judgment of the Court of Appeal dated 9th December 2021 which dismissed appellant’s appeal and granted respondent his reliefs.

Facts and Background

The plaintiff/respondent/respondent ((hereinafter referred to as ‘respondent’) was an employee of defendant/appellant/appellant-company (hereinafter referred to as ‘appellant’ or ‘appellant-company’ as the context allows) from October 2003 as Assistant Programmer and Systems Operator. He was promoted IT officer and then to Senior Programmer in October 2010. At the time of his separation from appellant-company he was the Regional I T Officer for Tema Operational Region of appellant company.

Upon the adoption of a system of prepaid metering by the appellant-company, the company devised a system for vending electricity credits for prepaid meters in May 2013. This system involved electricity vendors purchasing electricity credits in quotas for onward sale to customers, and came to be known as ‘quota systems’.

Not too long after the system was introduced the appellant-company began to receive complaints from a number of its vendors regarding unexplained shortages and deductions in their quota balances on various occasions. The company had difficulty identifying the source of these shortages in quotas, until the occurrence of an incident on 12th September, 2013, which opened a lid on things. On that day, the respondent, then an IT Officer at the Tema Regional office, without authorization, made a sale of electricity credit of GH¢4,000 to one customer who had purchased credit from a vending station, Optiplus Vending Station (hereinafter referred to as ‘Optiplus’), but which credit could not be uploaded to the customer’s metering system. He gained access to the vending system by entering a cashier’s cage at the ECG regional office, and using the office computers, remotely logged into the private vendor’s account with the vendor’s password. The effect of this action, dubbed ‘cross-vending’, was to cause a reduction in the quota of Optiplus, which did not receive the money, as it had already been paid to the Tema Regional Office.

When called upon to explain himself, the respondent’s explanation was that on 12th September, 2013, while on duty, he was called upon as the IT officer to assist a vendor, Optiplus, to complete the sale of credit purchased by a customer. The customer had made a purchase of credit from Optiplus, but the transfer from Optiplus onto