Atiku, Tinubu legal teams bicker over watermark on PEPT judgement CTCs
Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate in the 2023 election, Atiku Abubakar, has accused the five-member panel of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT), of granting access to President Bola Tinubu’s Legal Team to the Certified True Copies (CTCs) of its judgment prior to the petitioners’ notice.
It would recalled that counsels to the petitioners; the PDP and the Labour Party had waited all through last Friday waiting for the PEPT at the Court of Appeal headquarters premises to release CTCs of its final judgement on Wednesday which affirmed President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as duly elected and winner of the disputed February 25 presidential election as announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), on March 1, 2023.
Petitioners have 21 days to file their cases at the Supreme Court, and according to Chief Chris Uche, the lead counsel to Atiku Abubakar, the PEPT was wasting their time by delaying the release of its final judgement for party to study before approaching the apex court.
Atiku, while condemning the PEPT justices for the action, in a statement issued by his Special Assistant on Public Communication, Mr. Phrank Shaibu, Saturday, insisted that after causing needless delay in availing his own legal team of its judgment, the PEPT must explain to Nigerians and the world ambiguities around why the same copies of the judgment bore the watermark of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team.
However, in a swift response, the Tinubu legal team has defended the presence of its watermark on the documents released by the PEPT justices, saying they watermarked their copy of the PEPT judgement after collection from the Court of Appeal before circulating the scanned copies to members of their team.
Meanwhile, Atiku questioned the rationale of the PEPT in availing the Tinubu team of the documents while it kept them waiting.
“It is very clear that there are many questions begging for answers, including why the PEPC came to the decision to avail the Respondents, especially the Tinubu Legal Team to have a first receipt of the CTC of the judgment before the Plaintiffs.
“The curiosity is more confounding based on the fact that the lead counsel to Atiku and the PDP had pleaded in the open court to have express receipt of the judgment, to which Justice Haruna Tsammani agreed to and promised to make the document available the following day, which was Thursday.
“Nigerians want to know why the PEPC confers special privileges to the Tinubu Legal Team by making them have a first custody of copies of the PEPC judgment, even though it was more urgent for the Petitioners who needed the document in order to cause an appeal to the Supreme Court within 14 days including weekends.”
In the course of delivering its judgement, Atiku stated that the PEPC had spoken of the petition it was ruling upon in a vexatious and denigrating language as if it was a crime to bring a case of electoral banditry before the court.
He regretted that unfolding developments after the court’s ruling has “elicit suspicions about whether or not the Tinubu Legal Team provided clerical services to the PEPC. Otherwise, how and when did the ‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’ creep into a document that was supposed to be the official document of the Court of Appeal of Nigeria.
“We need to restate that the ‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’ on the top left-hand corner of all the 798 pages is neither a monochrome nor a metadata. It is actually a HEADER, meaning that except for a valid explanation, the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team is the originator of the document. For the purposes of clarity, “a header is text that is placed at the top of a page, while a footer is placed at the bottom of a page.
“Typically, these areas are used for inserting information such as the name of the document, the chapter heading, page numbers, creation date, and the like.” On the other hand, watermark is “a faint design made in some paper during manufacture that is visible when held against the light and typically identifies the maker of the document.
“The PEPC must, on its honour if indeed it still has any, clarify why the court chose to put the header of the Tinubu Legal Team on a CTC copy of its judgment document, while the only emblem that should have been on the document is the stamp of the Court of Appeal of Nigeria.
“Again, the PEPC must explain why it came to the discretionary decision of having the Respondents have a custody of the judgement earlier in the day on Friday while only making same available to the Petitioners later in the day, and only after the lead counsel to Atiku and PDP had written a second letter (the first was on Thursday) to the court demanding for copies of the judgment.
“Moreover, we have it on good authority that when the PEPC was informed that the CTC copies of the judgment given to the Respondents was already circulating in the public domain with the header of TPLT on it, a further delay was necessitated by the need for it to undertake a laundry of the documents by removing the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team header before handing over same to the lawyers of Atiku.
“Whereas the legal team of the PDP and Atiku have statutory 14 days to prepare its appeal to the Supreme Court, the PEPC had erased 2 days out of that 14 days, no thanks to the PEPC whose Chairman, Justice Tsamani had promised to make available the CTC copy of the judgment to Atiku a day after its judgement was rendered, which ought to have been on Thursday.
“Nigerians and the world are earnestly waiting for answers to these posers as the legal challenge shifts to the Supreme Court. Otherwise, it will validate suspicions that there were external factors involved in the formulation of the judgment and bring the entire judiciary of Nigeria into disrepute.
“Make no mistake about it. This legal challenge to the electoral banditry of February 25, which has now shifted to the apex court, is not about Atiku. It is indeed our last ditch effort to salvage our country and deepen our democracy. Against the background of the decimation of nearly all of the institutions of state including the Independent National Electoral Commission which dragged us into this quagmire, our intent is to ensure that the judiciary, the last hope of the common man does not go to the dogs.”
Explaining in its defence on the questionable watermark on the PEPT judgement documents, the Tinubu Legal Team in statement, Saturday, by its coordinator, Babatunde Ogala, dismissed the insinuations raised by the petitioner, over the watermark saying there was nothing untoward to it.
“Following some mischievous insinuations being made in certain quarters regarding the innocuous water-mark of copies of the consolidated judgment of the Court of Appeal with the inscription -“Tinubu Presidential Legal Team ‘TPLT’”, it is has become necessary to offer this clarification.
“After the delivery of judgment in the 3 (Three) election petitions by the Court of Appeal on September 6, 2023, the Court directed its registry to make physical copies of same available on September 7, 2023.
“Accordingly, the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team applied for a Certified True Copy of the said judgment and paid the prescribed fee.
“Lawyers for PDP were present at the registry at the same time to collect the same judgment.
“In fact, the representative of the PDP collected the first copy that was made available by the registry.
“On collecting our own copy, we immediately scanned and watermarked with the inscription – “Tinubu Presidential Legal Team ‘TPLT’” before circulating the scanned soft copies to the lawyers in our team.
“The Certified True Copy issued to us and other parties in the petitions by the registry does not contain the said inscription and any insinuation to the contrary is untrue.
“Counsel for the petitioners will also appreciate the fact that the insinuations being circulated in some quarters are untrue, unkind, unfair, and unfortunate, as they have the same certified copies of the judgment as we have,” the Tinubu team’s statement read.
