Media personality Abeiku Santana has heaved hot coals on the head of the founder and CEO of Pizzaman and Chickenman for putting two of his employees behind bars for theft.
The convicts, Seidu Karim and Rashid Abdullah were sentenced after they were found guilty of stealing 20 boxes of chicken wings and two gallons of vegetable cooking oil from the restaurant’s warehouse in Kumasi, Ghana.
The employees were handed down five years of imprisonment.
Abeiku Santana has, however, berated Christian Boakye Yiadom – the founder and CEO of one of the fastest-growing Ghanaian-owned Fast Food chains – for taking harsh punishment on the poor workers.
According to the radio presenter, the CEO shouldn’t have reported the matter to law enforcement but instead, could have explored less punitive ways of handling the case such as deducting the cost of the stolen items from the salary of the culprits.
“Your worker steals 20 cartons of chicken wings from you and you get them imprisoned for five years? What’s the sense in that? Poor workers steal from you, deduct the cost of the stolen items from their pay…But they have been jailed five years each,” Abeiku Santana lashed out.
Speaking further on Okay FM, he posited, that “We’re not supporting or condoning criminal acts but jailing people for five years for stealing chicken wings is unacceptable. It’s unacceptable. Don’t engage the youth as motivational whatnot anymore.”
The Prosecuting officer, ASP Jonas Newlove Adjei, told the court presided over by Judge Fred Obekyere Esq, that on Monday, May 1, 2023, the complainant, who is the executive chef of Pizzaman, received a call from his warehouse manager that two cooking oil and eight boxes of chicken wings had been stolen.
The chef upon hearing the news quickly went to take their daily stock and discovered that indeed the items had been stolen.
In an emergency meeting the same day, workers were asked to provide the stolen items.
The news outlet reports that during interrogation, Abdullah revealed that Karim hid two gallons of cooking oil behind the fence wall.
Karim, in his defense, stated that he saw Rashid Abdullah hiding two boxes of chicken wings at the back of the fence wall as well.
The stolen items were retrieved from them and they were later handed over to the police, where investigations were conducted.
In the course of investigations, Karim confessed that in a period of two months, he had stolen 20 gallons of cooking oil from the company.
The accused persons were charged and sentenced to five years imprisonment with hard labour each.