More than a year after her arrest for unlawfully entering Ghana to engage in illegal mining following a 2018 deportation, Chinese businesswoman En Huang, but infamously called Aisha Huang has been sentenced to jail by a Court sitting in Accra.
The High Court announced its judgment earlier today, sentencing her to four years and six months, with an additional fine of GHC 48,000 ($ 3,996) and deportation again after her jail term.
The judge, Justice Lydia Osei Marfo said she found her crimes to be serious and said had the state prosecuted Ms. Huang under the current Minerals and Mining law, she would have been handed a stiffer punishment with more years of jail term – a minimum of 15 years and maximum of 25 years.
“The accused person abused our kind hospitality when her first trial was truncated and she was deported to her home country. She came back this time with new personality with a different name, and a different date of birth.
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“I wish I had the right to impose the punishment under the current law,” she said.
The sentiments of the judge perhaps embody the outrage that broke following news of Ms Huang’s arrest in September 2022.
Many Ghanaians raised questions, especially surrounding the circumstances of her first arrest and why she wasn’t prosecuted, or whether indeed she was deported.
Comments by President Akufo-Addo during a radio interview during that time also raised more uncertainty, when he said he was unsure if she was in fact deported or that she fled the country the first time and returned.
The Attorney-General obviously under public pressure, decided to show commitment in prosecuting her for those crimes committed during her first arrest in 2017 and afterward – charging her for illegal mining, illegal unemployment of foreign nationals, and unlawful entry.
Witnesses who testified in the course of the trial noted her notoriety both in how she re-entered Ghana, by forging a marriage certificate to obtain a residence permit and aggressively destroying farmlands owned by locals for illegal mining purposes.
