Ms Okbell Majdoub, former head of Service Quality (SQ) Department of the defunct Beige-Bank, has testified that Consolidated Bank Ghana (CBG) is occupying three of its structures.
“I am particularly referring to CBG branches located at Spintex, Atomic and Weija,” the fourth witness said.
This was during her evidence-in-chief at the High Court trying Michael Nyinaku, former Chief Executive Officer of the Beige Group (TBG).
She said she joined Beige in 2016 as the head of SQ and it had a lot of subsidiaries in the financial services industry therefore her role was to oversee service quality assurance across all the financial service subsidiaries of TBG.
“The key responsibility of the Service Quality department was to ensure consistency in the service flow across the sub-units. This required training, brand standardization [look and feel] and service measures,” she told the Court.
The witness said for each office that she and her team worked on, there were standard architectural designs and layouts that served as a guide on how the office should be set up.
“We had also developed a standard look and feel concept {or décor theme] for every branch and that is what we all worked to achieve.
Key ingredients of this décor theme were the use of particular colours for guest lounges, particular colours of sofas, a mini library [bookshelves with books arranged in them] and a unique feature that we described as a “kokonsa window” or a splash window.
She said the intent behind that design concept was to make the branch look uniquely attractive and to keep the branch in the minds of all passers-by.
“I can confirm that as of today, these “kokonsa” windows still exist at these locations which have now become branches of CBG.”
She said the level of detail and decoration that went into each branch varied, depending on their size, adding that smaller branches had limited space, so their decor was minimal.
On the other hand, larger branches had more space to work with, resulting in more extensive decor, the witness said.
She gave some examples of larger branches, including Labone, Airport West, Atomic Junction, Tesano, Osu, Weija, Tamale, and Adum (in Kumasi).
These branches, she said, were premium branches and they received extensive décor.
“I am familiar with these branches because as I already stated, I led the team that was responsible for setting them up these branches,” the witness informed the High Court.
The SQ team was a department that operated under TBG, and funding came from the finance office of TBG.
Nyinaku has been charged for stealing and money laundering which he has pleaded not guilty to.
