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PPP has complicated its case - Lawyer

The PPP has said it will sue the EC Chair for contempt after it held onto the party’s filing fee last week despite the injunction.

 

The EC Chair has explained that she accepted the money from the PPP because she thought the party had withdrawn its suit challenging the fee.

Some Ghanaians believe the EC could be cited for contempt following her decision to accept the filing fee from the PPP.

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But private legal practitioner, Elikplim Agbemava disagrees.

“Normally, when a party is asking for an interlocutory injunction, it is for the compliance of all the parties in the case; it is not  the compliance of just the defendant. So I would say that the PPP was supposed to also comply with the injunction by not doing anything that will prejudice the case,” he said.

“I wouldn’t say they are both in contempt. I would say that the matter has been rendered academic. We have to wait for the High Court to decide...from where I sit, I think the issue has been complicated by the PPP and not the EC,” he explained on GBC News.

The PPP is in court over the GHC50, 000 filing fee for presidential nominees, leading to an injunction placed on some aspects of the filing process.

The party is pursuing a declaration that Regulation 45 of C.I. 94 is discriminatory, arbitrary, capricious, and unreasonable. “That the entire C.I. 94 does not contain the appropriate relevant provisions that meet the intendment of Article 296 of the 1992 Constitution.”

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The other reliefs sought include: “A declaration that the proper instrument within the meaning of the relevant laws of the Republic of Ghana, in charging a deposit or fees for conducting a presidential or parliamentary election, by the Electoral Commission, is a statutory instrument and not constitutional instrument. An order directed at the defendants to desist from collecting and or receiving the said deposit or fees for the conduct of the 2016 presidential and parliamentary elections until the appropriate statutory instruments have been passed in accordance with appropriate legal rights.”

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