Supreme Court prevents petitioners from tendering evidence

The Supreme Court on Wednesday by a five-to-four majority sustained an objection restraining the petitioners from tendering in evidence two coalition forms from Akuapim South.

Mr Tsatsu Tsikata, lead counsel for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), had raised an objection when Mr Philip Addison, lead counsel for the petitioners tried to introduce the evidence for Mr Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, key witness for the first respondent in the on-going presidential election petition hearing, to discuss.

Mr Addison wanted to tender in evidence the forms to back his claim that Special Voting centres do not have codes.

He also wanted to discredit the star witness’s assertion that the collation forms bore the codes of the polling station where the election took place.

According to Mr Tsikata, the witness could not authenticate the form which had been provided by the second respondents.

Mr Addison, however, said he was confronting the witness with his own evidence which he had already identified.

There were brief verbal exchanges between Mr Addison and Mr Tony Lithur, counsel for the first respondent over a voluminous document classified as the Further and Better Particulars which Mr Addison had wanted Mr Asiedu-Nketia to identify.

Mr Addison suggested to Mr Asiedu-Nketia that the Further and Better Particulars contained 11,842 pink sheets but not the 8,621 pink sheets the respondents claimed they had been served in their affidavit by the petitioners.

Mr Tsikata objected to this stating that paragraph 12 of the affidavit of the respondents did not make any reference to the Further and Better Particulars.

Justice Atuguba ruled that the question could be rephrased without asking the witness to refer to the Further and Better Particulars.

Mr Addison suggested that the petitioners supplied information on 11,842 polling stations and the witness said that he could not confirm.

Mr Addison also said the petitioners were only served with 4941 of the affidavits by the respondents adding that of the total number, 1278 of the affidavits were duplicates and an additional 291 were not at all in the 11842 polling stations.

“171 were included in 704 lists that the petitioners are no longer relying on”, he said.

Mr Asiedu-Nketia once again said he could not confirm the claim.

On the issue of unknown polling stations, Mr Addison provided lists of exhibit numbers which he said the names of polling stations with code numbers were not part of the original list of 26,000 polling stations provided by the second respondent.

Mr Asiedu-Nketia, who identified those lists, admitted the names and code numbers were not what the EC provided but insisted that supervised elections were held in those polling stations.

“My lord, those polling stations can be identified. Supervised elections took place there and polling agents of the parties including the petitioners were present and certified the declared results”, he stressed.

Source: GNA