A GH¢50 deposit. A GH¢270,610 windfall with no explanation. That single scenario carries more than half the marks in this real ICAG Business & Corporate Law question — alongside two of the most commonly muddled ideas in legal study: judicial precedent, and the rules courts use to interpret statutes. This post walks through the real question, the full marking scheme, and how each part should be structured to earn every mark on offer.
The Question, In Full
Part (a) asked candidates to explain binding and persuasive precedent (4 marks). Part (b) asked for the Golden Rule, Mischief Rule, and Eiusdem Generis Rule of statutory interpretation, 2 marks each (6 marks). Part (c) presented Kwame Yayra, a bank customer whose account received an unexplained GH¢270,610 transfer months after a trivial GH¢50 opening deposit, and asked candidates to explain his conduct under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2020 (Act 1044), and to explain the three main stages of money laundering (10 marks combined).
The Worked Solution
Binding precedent comes from a higher court in the same jurisdiction and must be followed by lower courts; persuasive precedent comes from a different jurisdiction or context and may influence, but doesn’t bind, a court’s decision.
The Golden Rule reads a statute for legislative intent to avoid absurd outcomes; the Mischief Rule asks what problem the statute was designed to fix; the Eiusdem Generis Rule restricts general words following a specific list to the same class as those specific words.
On the scenario: Kwame Yayra’s account pattern — trivial opening deposit, no activity, then a huge unexplained transfer he couldn’t document — is a textbook suspicion trigger under Act 1044, obliging the bank to file a suspicious transaction report. The three stages of laundering that pattern sits inside are Placement (dirty money enters the system), Layering (transactions obscure its origin), and Integration (it re-enters the legitimate economy).
Exam Tip: Paired or tripled definition questions (binding vs persuasive; three interpretation rules) are marked item by item — structure your answer to visibly match the question’s own lettering, don’t blend everything into one paragraph. And “in the light of the provisions of [an Act]” always means apply the law to the specific facts given, by name.
Conclusion
Foundation-level law questions are not automatically easy marks — they’re marks that reward structure. Answer binding and persuasive separately. Answer each interpretation rule separately. And when a scenario names real amounts and real dates, use them in your answer — that’s where the applied marks live.
Ready to Go Deeper?
This topic is covered in full inside the Business & Corporate Law revision kit, plus every past question video breakdown, at Passkoguru.
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