SamuelAtokwamebaah/ghana-banking-collapse

Why Ghana's 23 savings & loans companies collapsed — dataset hand-built from Bank of Ghana revocation notices, analysed in Python and SQL, with interactive charts and policy recommendations. # Ghana's Banking Sector Collapse, 2017–2019 Every financial institution closed in Ghana's banking-sector clean-up, compiled from Bank of Ghana primary sources, plus an analysis of *why* the 23 savings and loans companies failed. **418 institutions. GHS 2.30 billion in net-worth deficits. Over 360,000 depositors.** 📊 **Interactive charts** · 📄 **Full findings** --- ## The finding The Bank of Ghana revoked 23 savings and loans and finance house licences on 16 August 2019, publishing its reasons for each. Coding those reasons shows the failures were not accidents of a hard market: - **Related-party lending appears in 17 of 23 institutions**, and 14 of those 17 also involved misreporting or false accounting records. That co-occurrence is the story. In those cases the Bank of Ghana's notice describes funds placed with companies connected to the institutions' owners, alongside accounts that did not reflect them. - **Every institution breached the statutory deadline, all twenty of them.** Act 930 s.105–106 require capital adequacy to be restored within **180 days**, after which the Bank of Ghana *shall* resolve the institution. Median overrun: **5.2×**. Worst: Sterling Financial Services, which reported a capital adequacy ratio of **-1,469% in March 2010**, stopped filing returns two months later, folded in 2011, and kept its licence until **2019**. That is **19.2×** the statutory maximum. - **Losses are concentrated, not spread.** Five institutions account for **68%** of the GHS 2.30bn deficit. They were identifiable years in advance. Liquidity failure, being unable to pay depositors, is cited in 21 of 23 cases. It is the symptom. On the regulator’s stated reasons, related-party lending is the cause. ### What follows from it The uncomfortable part is that **the rules already existed**. Act 930 s.64(2) capped related-party exposure at 25% of net own funds; CDH ran at 319%. Sections 104–106 set a 180-day statutory clock for resolving a failing institution, in ma …