Clydestone Ghana Plc, one of only two technology companies listed on the Ghana Stock Exchange, has taken MTN’s parent companies to court over intellectual property it says it developed nearly two decades ago and was never compensated for.
The company filed a writ of summons and statement of claim on July 27 in the Commercial Division of Ghana’s High Court, naming three defendants: Scancom PLC, which operates as MTN Ghana; MTN Group Limited, the Johannesburg-listed parent; and MobileMoney Fintech Limited, the newly incorporated Ghanaian entity that now runs MTN’s mobile money business.
What Clydestone Is Claiming
According to the company’s regulatory filing, MTN Ghana approached Clydestone in 2007 to build a complete commercial and operational framework for launching a mobile money service — the business model, the operational architecture, an implementation plan and a supporting business case.
The work, Clydestone says, was personally authored by its founder and chief executive, Paul Jacquaye.
Clydestone contends the engagement was meant to be governed by a non-disclosure agreement and a memorandum of understanding — documents it says MTN never signed, despite repeated requests.
The company alleges that MTN went on to use its methodology anyway, first when MTN Mobile Money Ghana launched in 2009, and later across the group’s mobile money operations in other African markets.
Clydestone is seeking declarations, damages and other equitable remedies. It has not disclosed a monetary figure.
Why Now, Not 2009
The most striking element of the filing is the timeline. Clydestone says the alleged misuse has been ongoing since 2009 — 17 years before it went to court. Its explanation is that it could not previously quantify the scale of what it says MTN built on its work, because no independently verifiable data existed on the mobile money unit’s size or earnings.
That changed this year, the company says.
Two documents published in March gave it the numbers it needed: the GSMA’s State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money, which ranked Ghana as the world’s top-rated mobile money regulatory market, and MTN Ghana’s own 2025 annual report, which disclosed about 19.3 million active mobile money users and roughly 6 billion cedis in annual mobile money revenue.
Clydestone says it was only after reviewing those figures that it revisited its records from 2007 and concluded it had grounds to sue.
That explanation will likely face scrutiny in court. Claims rooted in contract or unjust enrichment in Ghana are generally subject to a six-year limitation period, and Clydestone’s own filing places the alleged wrongdoing’s origin at 2007 and its continuation from 2009.
The company’s argument effectively asks the court to treat its cause of action as arising from discovery of the scale of harm in 2026, not from the conduct itself — a legal theory MTN’s lawyers are almost certain to challenge as time-barred.
A Mismatch in Scale
The dispute also throws into relief just how differently the two companies’ fortunes have diverged since that 2007 engagement. Clydestone, a payments infrastructure firm founded in 1989 and holder of a Bank of Ghana enhanced payment service provider licence, has been a comparatively minor player in recent years.
The company reported total revenue of roughly 23.9 million cedis in 2024, and unaudited first-quarter 2026 revenue of just 1.4 million cedis.
MTN’s mobile money arm in Ghana alone now reports annual revenue north of 6 billion cedis. If Clydestone’s claim to authorship of the platform’s foundational design is ultimately upheld, it would represent one of the more consequential intellectual-property judgments in the region’s fintech history.
If it fails, the size of that gap may itself become part of the story — a small legacy vendor trying to stake a claim to a fortune it says it never got a share of.
What Comes Next
MTN has not filed a public response, and Clydestone said in its announcement that it will not comment further on the substantive issues while the case is before the court. The company said its operations, customers and ongoing business are unaffected by the litigation.
The filing lands as MTN Ghana works through a separate, unrelated regulatory process: the localisation of its mobile money business into MobileMoney Fintech Limited, completed earlier this year to satisfy Bank of Ghana ownership rules.
That restructuring is what makes MobileMoney Fintech — a company only months old — a named defendant in a dispute over conduct alleged to date back to 2007.
Clydestone’s legal counsel is NT and Co (Abransamadu Chambers). No hearing date has been made public.
