A legal practitioner, Abraham Amaliba, has explained the Electoral Commission (EC) has trapped the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) by accepting the GHc50,000 presidential filing fees despite a pending injunction application on the said fees.
With the exception of the PPP, the Commission led by the chairperson rejected the GHC50,000 filing fees of all the presidential candidates who submitted theirs during the two-day exercise which ended at exactly 5:00pm Friday .
The EC had said it rejected the fees because of a pending court case filed by two political parties – Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom’s Progressive People’s Party on Wednesday.
Notwithstanding, the Commission went ahead Friday morning to accept the PPP’s filing fees, but its chairperson, Charlotte Osei explained later that the EC took the banker’s draft of PPP thinking the party was no longer pursuing the court case.
“By presenting it I thought they had cancelled their case in court. May be they have withdrawn it, that was my impression,” she explained to the media.
However, Mr Amaliba argues on Onua FM’s Ghana Dadwene Friday that the PPP’s decision to present a banker’s draft indicates the party does not believe in the injunction it filed.
“They [PPP] don’t believe that the money is too much. They should not have paid because what the EC has done is to trap them,” he said.
He added: “It is strange because if you are served injunction, you don’t continue to do what you want t stop so the PPP should not have added the banker’s draft to the forms”.
He contended that knowing it had serve the EC with the interlocutory injunction, the PPP “should not have added the banker’s draft”.
Meanwhile the National Chairman of the PPP, Nii Allotey Brew-Hammond said it did so because “the banker’s draft was part of the requirements…if we did not add it, the EC could have also said we did not complete the forms”
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