It appears the Electoral Commission’s hurdles will not go away anytime soon with barely two months to the elections.
The Progressive People’s Party (PPP), which is already in court against the Commission’s filing fees for presidential and parliamentary nominees, has indicated it will sue the Commission again for contempt, over its decision to accept their Flagbearer’s filing fee, despite an injunction prohibiting that action.
The PPP filed a suit at the High Court early this month, seeking an interlocutory injunction to prevent the Commission from receiving the nominations in protest against what they describe as “high” filing fees set by the EC for aspirants.
According to the Chairman of the PPP, Allotey Brew Hammond, although they asked the Commission to return the bank draft after the presentation on Friday, the EC Chair, refused to hand it back to them. “We have started the motion of talking to our lawyers to get the processes of filing for contempt because our relief was to have the EC not to accept any filing fee and since they have accepted our filing fee, they are in contempt of the injunction,” Mr Brew Hammond told Citi News.
Reacting to claims the PPP deliberately presented their filing fee to the EC as a trap and that the PPP is also in contempt for presenting the fee, the party Chairman said, “We will leave it to the judges to tell us if offering and accepting are the same thing.
Even if we trapped them [EC], we made the effort to remind the Commission that they were not supposed to accept but they [EC] objected.”
‘EC accepts filing fees’
In an interesting twist last week, the Commission accepted the filing fee of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) flagbearer despite an interlocutory injunction placed on the process by the same party.
Charlotte Osei justifies receipt of PPP’s filing fee despite suit
The Electoral Commission Chairperson, Charlotte Osei, has defended the decision of the election management body to accept the filing fee of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), saying the Commission accepted the filing fee because they assumed the party was no longer interested pursuing the case in court. “By presenting it; I thought they had withdrawn the case, that was the impression,” she said.
‘We didn’t trick EC’
The Director of Operations for the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), Nana Ofori Owusu, has stated that the party had no intention of tricking the Electoral Commission. Speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis programme, The Big Issue, Nana Owusu said by presenting their nomination forms with the filing fees, the PPP was only doing what was required by law.
PPP could face contempt over filing fee submission’
Meanwhile, legal practitioner, John Ndebugri, has said the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) risks being cited for contempt of court for presenting its filing fee to the Electoral Commission (EC), despite being the very entity to place an injunction on the process.
The Progressive People’s Party is expected to hold a press conference this week to address the turn of events, as they await on the court to hear the substantive matter.
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