Bartels was fired from the cabinet by President John Kufuor in 2008, allegedly due to his involvement in the stealing of forty-two parcels of cocaine which were confiscated by the police.
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Bartels is a member of the Afro-European Bartels family, whose ancestor Cornelius Ludewich Bartels was Governor-General of the Dutch Gold Coast between 1798 and 1804, and whose son Carel Hendrik Bartels was the most important mulatto trader on the Gold Coast in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.