Evangelist Patricia Asiedua, popularly known as Nana Agradaa has reacted to allegations of fraud and denied defrauding or swindling her church members.
Explaining herself in a video, she said, she actually invited church members for service last Friday and gave out money to help them with their various businesses.
She said she also invited anyone who was interested in being helped, to come to church on Friday (October 7, 2022), convert to Christianity and become a church member.
As usual of a church, she said there was also fundraising through offertory last Friday.
And so if new members, who were attending church for the first time and wrote their names, offered money to support the church and did not receive anything in return from her, they should count that as new members, their opportune time will surely come and therefore should not attribute that to fraud.
She disagreed with the allegation that the GH¢1000, GH¢800, GH¢700, and coins offertory by members who attended the church service and willingly donated, should be interpreted as fraud.
Police arrest
The police on Sunday arrested Nana Agradaa, the Founder of the Heaven Way Church at Weija in Accra, over an alleged money doubling scam charge levelled against her by some church members.
That followed viral social media reports showing members of the church, both new and old, who had thronged the church premises to demand their money.
In a statement issued on October 9, 2022, the police said the suspect was assisting the police in investigations into the matter.
The police have, therefore, urged victims of the alleged money-doubling scam to report to the Accra Regional Police Command for further investigations.
A viral video last Saturday showed aggrieved members of the church alleging that their leader, a one-time traditional priestess, had swindled them.
According to them, Nana Agradaa, also known as Mama Pat, had promised to double their money through her special spiritual purifications.
Consequently, the church members said, they gave her various sums of money, only to find out that the promise was a hoax.
First arrest
This is not the first time Nana Agradaa has been in the grip of the police over an alleged scam.
She was arrested in April 2021 after a joint team from the police and the National Security, in collaboration with the National Communications Authority (NCA), had raided the premises of her two TV stations at Kasoa in the Central Region.
Nana Agradaa was said to have admitted to the illegality and was placed in police custody initially to assist with further investigations.
The team also seized equipment used in the transmission of television signals from both stations.
Nana Agradaa denounces her ‘sika gari’ deity
Her arrest was part of an operation that led to the closure of 49 television stations in the country on a single day.
However, Nana Agradaa was subsequently sentenced by an Accra Circuit Court to a fine of GH¢36,000 for operating a television channel without licence and displaying charlatanic materials.
