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The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mrs Betty Mould-Iddrisu, yesterday announced that the Transition Team�s report on the tenure of the previous government had uncovered about 46 irregular activities, some of which had been handed over to the CID and the BNI. She added that three special teams had been established to go into some of the irregularities of the previous government and that the SFO was also investigating the activities of the National Lotteries Authority and the School Feeding Programme, which received more income than it expended. Similar investigations, she noted, were being conducted into past government loans of more than GH�100,000 which were given out but whose beneficiaries had refused to pay, noting that the investigations were to identify the defaulters, while another investigation was ongoing into irregularities in unclaimed salaries and pension emoluments. �We are still conducting investigations into allegations of financial malfeasance and one development is ready, which I will not disclose, but it is ready to be handed for prosecution,� Mrs Mould-Iddrisu stated. She said ministries had been directed to set up internal committees of enquiry into 35 activities identified in the Transition Team�s Report to lead to further investigations by the security agencies, adding that if it became necessary the state would prosecute the culprits who would be identified. Taking her turn at the meet-the-press series in Accra, Mrs Mould-Iddrisu also disclosed that the government owed more than $1 billion in judgement debt due to cases it had lost in the courts of law and outlined plans by her ministry to enhance the administration of economic and criminal justice in the country. According to her, the judgement debt , some of which dated back over a decade, included compensation in land cases but gave the assurance that the government was in negotiations to resolve some of the compelling issues. She hinted that the debts were generated from activities of the ministries of Justice and Finance and Economic Planning and wondered why attempts were not made to settle them in the past. Mrs Mould-Iddrisu�s address hinged on every aspect of the Justice Ministry, as well as departments and agencies under the ministry. She also gave hints of various investigations being conducted into the activities of past government dealings, saying that those which would be found to be irregular and warranted prosecution would be prosecuted. The Attorney-General stated that there was outrageously huge judgement debts against the government over the last eight years, especially regarding land compulsorily acquired by the government, adding that one of such cases in which there was an excess of more than GH�50,000,000 was being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). She mentioned some of the cases in which the government incurred the judgement debts as the CP claims, attachment orders against the government over its properties in Belgium, France, Holland and the USA, among others, stating that in the CP claims there was an excess of more than $500 million. Mrs Mould-Iddrisu also mentioned some of the new cases as the Asafo Market Interchange, the Ghana International Airlines Ltd, as well as a case in which someone was claiming about $18 million against the government. The Attorney-General announced that under new legislation to streamline the business sector and also ensure sanity in the operations of the economy, the Economic and Organised Crime Bill was among one of the bills being passed. She said the Economic and Organised Crime Bill, when passed into law, would replace the SFO Act which restricted the mandate of the SFO and establish the Economic and Organised Crime Agency with wide powers to investigate a wide range of economic crimes, including advanced fee fraud. Other crimes to be covered by the agency include economic loss, human trafficking, money laundering, cyber crime (sakawa) and so on. Mrs Mould-Iddrisu said the Legislation Drafting Division of the ministry had sent bills relating to the Criminal and Other Offences Amendment Bill to take care of pre-trial bargaining in complex cases, Property Rights and Spouses Bill, which would take care of spouses in various kinds of relationships, as well as Rights and the Interstate Succession Bill. Other bills are the Interpretation Bill, the Alternative Dispute Resolution Bill and the Public Officers Accountability Bill which would give effect to the code of conduct of public officials and contain guidelines for conflict of interest and also delineate areas of gift to such officers, including a wide range of innocuous gifts which now would be offences. The Attorney-General further stated that the Companies Code, which was passed in 1963, had become outmoded and not taking care of current problems of business law and, therefore, she had tasked drafters to prepare a draft by the end of this month in order to review the law to take account of issues of insolvency and other cases. She said the Registrar General�s Department was being decentralised and reformed to make it efficient to current business practice and in that regard the department was collaborating with stakeholders such as the Ghana Post to speed up company registration. She also said a new software had been developed in that respect. The Attorney-General was assisted by Ms Gertrude Aikins, the acting Director of Public Prosecutions, and Mr George A. Sarpong, the Director of the Ghana School of Law, to answer some of the questions. Mr Sarpong said the criteria for given quotas to graduates of the University of Ghana, Legon, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, among others, were to maintain standards in view of the large number of graduates who were being churned out by those institutions. He said, for instance, that while KNUST produced 212 students, Legon produced 110, and while the lecturer to Law students ratio at KNUST was 10:800, that of Legon was 20:240 and for that matter all those issues were taken into consideration before arriving at the quota.