Election Petition: NPP’s pink sheets fell short by 3,337 - Ato Dadzie

The Respondents in the election petition case claim the Petitioners challenging the presidential results of the 2012 elections tendered 8,505 or less pink sheets to the Court and not 11,842 as affidavit evidence as they had claimed from the beginning of the case.

The Spokesperson for the respondents’ legal team, Nana Ato Dadzie, told Journalists after the hearing of the petition on Thursday May 9, 2013 that the pink sheets tendered in evidence by the Petitioners fell short by 3,337.

He said: “We have maintained all along that what they’ve supplied is nothing more than eight thousand [and] something”, adding that: “…We’ve said that there’s a shortfall of 3,337, could be more”.

Nana Ato Dadzie noted “…If that gap shows on the computer, then they will have to account for it, but on our side, we say that we account for it by saying that it is as a result of the duplicates, triplicates, the quadruplicates [of pink sheets]…and that these duplicates, triplicates and quadruplicates which they admit or he [Bawumia] admitted is in his evidence material were put in to bloat [the number of pink sheets]”.

At Thursday’s hearing, the Bench, at the instance of the Counsel for the governing Party, Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata ordered an independent audit of all the pink sheets tendered in evidence by the Petitioners.

The directive came after Mr. Tsikata asserted, during his seventh day of cross examination of key witness Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia that the petitioners did not submit to the respondents, all the 11,842 pink sheets out of the total of 26,002, based upon which they are in court to challenge the 2012 presidential election results.

Mr. Tsikata had earlier insisted in open court, before a near-three-hour recess to do the counting that, the pink sheets tendered in evidence were fraught with duplications with the sole intent and purpose of bloating the number of pink sheets to arrive at the 11,842 number which has been repeated ad nauseum by the Petitioners in Court.

The Lead Counsel for the petitioners, Mr. Philip Addison, strongly objected to Mr. Tsikata’s application but later challenged the other side to do the counting right there and then.

He insisted they submitted exactly 11,842 pink sheets to the Court Registry and said it was incumbent upon the Respondents to have rectified any discrepancies rather than taking advantage of it in Court.

Lead Counsel for the President and the Electoral Commission supported Mr. Tsikata’s application for a head count of the pink sheets.

The Bench eventually ruled that international Accounting firm KPMG, had been agreed on by the two sides to undertake the auditing.