Election petition: Supreme Court delivers judgment today after 17 sittings
-Ghana's apex court will today bring an end to the 2020 election petition
- John Mahama petitioned the court to challenge the outcome of the 2020 presidential elections
- He said there was no winner in the election, and that a rerun must be ordered between him and President Nana Akufo-Addo
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The Supreme Court will deliver its judgment in the 2020 presidential election petition today, Thursday, March 4, 2021.
The judgment comes after 17 days of sittings including five days of pre-trial.
Source: Facebook
John Mahama, the flagbearer of the NDC petitioned the Supreme Court to order a second round of the December 7, 2020, presidential election.
According to him, the votes obtained by the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) candidate, President Nana Akufo-Addo, and himself in the election as declared by the Electoral Commission (EC) Chair were not enough for a candidate to be declared the winner.
Today’s sitting will be the eighteenth as the Court either dismiss or uphold the pleas of the former president.
Mahama’s lawyers said in their closing address that they had proven successfully without equivocation that there was no winner in the 2020 presidential elections.
Meanwhile, Mahama is said to be “worried” ahead of the judgment because of Court disregarded statutes passed by Ghana’s parliament during the trial.
According to his legal team, the Court's refusal to apply these statutes led to the former president being denied a “fair” hearing in the trial.
“…We think that the petitioner is being denied a fair hearing and it is important to pursue these issues to the logical conclusions,” a spokesperson for the former president’s legal team, Sammy Gyamfi, stated in a post-trial interview on Monday, February 22, 2021.
In other news on YEN.com.gh, Tsatsu Tsikata, the lead counsel for Mahama in the election petition trial, said former president Kufuor was determined to jail him by “hook or crook” during his administration.
The Accra Fast Track High Court in June 2008 sentenced the former Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), Chief Executive, to five years imprisonment for wilfully causing financial loss to the State.
He was charged with three counts of wilfully causing financial loss of GHS230,000 (2.3 billion old Ghana cedis) to the State through a loan he guaranteed for Valley Farms, a private company, on behalf of GNPC and another count of misapplying public property.
“I could see by the beginning of 2001, the determination, by hook or crook to find something against me. That is what led to all these interesting cases against me,” he stated on the KSM show on Pan African TV.
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Source: YEN.com.gh
