Editor-in-Chief of the New Crusading Guide Newspaper, Kweku Baako Jnr. has expressed fears that the election record slips (pink sheets) submitted to the President of the nine-member Bench hearing the election petition case, could have been compromised.
Kweku Baako’s concern follows the Court’s decision to use Justice William Atuguba’s copies of pink sheets to cross-check those audited by international auditing and accounting firm KPMG.
“Were they quarantined? Where were they? Who kept them?” Kweku Baako questioned on Joy FM’s News Analysis Programme ‘Newsfile’, on Saturday June 8, 2013.
Kweku Baako Jnr. was in good company with co-panelist and former Attorney General, Nii Ayikoi Otoo who also wondered: “Why should the control only be with the Presiding Judge’s copies?”
He said: “The Judges have been constituted by Her Ladyship the Chief Justice with equal rights; all the nine justices sitting there will have to give a judgment, a decision, an opinion one way or the other at the end of the day. All of them are supposed to have exhibits also served on them”.
On suggestions by the Host of the Programme that the eight other Judges may have agreed to that arrangement to have on the President’s copies used as the control check mechanism, Nii Ayikoi Otoo said: “Well that is on condition that they all have the same set”.
Rebutting another suggestion by the Host that all the nine Justices could be having the same copies of the pink sheets thus superfluous to have all them use their copies as control checks, Nii Ayikoi Otoo said: “We’ve been having difficulties where we are being told in the Courtroom that the numbering of certain exhibits do not tally with what have been served. How are we sure that the numbers and the markings of the Presiding Judge’s one are the same as what another Judge is holding”.
The auditing of the pink sheets was ordered by the Court at the instance of Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata, Lead Counsel for the Third Respondent, National Democratic Congress.
He had raised doubts about the Petitioners’ persistent claim in Court that they submitted 11,842 pink sheets to the Court as exhibits with which they intended proving their case of rigging in the 2012 elections.
Source: XYZ
