BRUCE v. COMMISSIONER OF POLICE

JUDGMENT OF AKUFO-ADDO J.S.C.

Akufo-Addo J.S.C. delivered the judgment of the court .The appellant George Frank Cleland Bruce (hereinafter referred to as Bruce) was at all material times a clerk of the Accra City Council. As such clerk he was responsible for, among other things, the issue of extension of hours licences to hotels and other entertainment establishments on the application of, and upon payment of the requisite fees, by the proprietors of such hotels and entertainment establishments. The prescribed fee payable is ten shillings for every extended hour beyond midnight.

On various days in March and April last year (1962) the appellant Bruce on the application of one Godson Udensi Okpara (hereinafter called Okpara) the proprietor of a bar known as Hotel de Africana at Christiansborg issued to Okpara a number of extension of hours licences.

In these licences, as was discovered by the police, the extended hours indicated did not tally with those recorded in the stubs of the licences which remained in the licence book when the licences had been torn off through a perforation, the extended hours in the licences being in all cases longer than those recorded in the stubs. The licences in the possession of Okpara revealed that the extended hours stated therein had been altered (admittedly by Bruce) from figures which originally tallied with those in the stubs to different figures representing longer hours of extension. The fees indicated in the stubs as having been paid for these licences represented the correct amounts payable for the hours stated in the stubs. This meant that the fees stated in the stubs as paid were less than the fees which either should have been paid or were actually paid for the licences in the possession of Okpara.

It was also the duty of the appellant Bruce to make up daily a cashier's return of daily receipts, and in the returns which he made for the various days on which the said licences were issued he reproduced the figures both for the hours in respect of which the licences were issued and the amounts paid in fees as stated in the stubs.

Bruce and Okpara were charged before the circuit court, Bruce with four counts of stealing the various sums of money which represented the differences between the amounts stated in the stubs and the fees payable for the hours indicated in the actual licences, four counts of forgery in respect of the alterations in the licences and four counts of falsification of accounts in respect of th