11th September, 2023
The Court of Appeal has uploaded the judgment of the Presidential Election Petition Court(PEPC) on its website amid vicious insinuations linking it with President Bola Tinubu’s camp.
Noticeably, none of the pages of the 794-page document bears any watermark of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team, that featured in the copy that first hit public space.
The court announced the upload of the consolidated judgment in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter on Sunday.
“CERTIFIED TRUE COPY OF THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION PETITION COURT 2023 JUDGEMENT. Having considered and decided that the three Petitions Nos. CA/PEPC/03/2023; CA/PEPC/04/2023 and CA/PEPC/05/2023 are… Follow the link below for the CTC of the Judgment”, the court wrote.
After the first copy of the judgment hit the social media, some of the parties in the case questioned the appearance of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team(TPLT) header on the document.
The PDP asked the court to explain whether the Tinubu legal team did not offer some clerical assistance to it in the writing of the judgment.
The Labour Party via its publicity secretary Obiora Ifoh, also made the same allegation.
Ifoh stated, “Consequent upon the revelation that Certified True Copies (CTC) of the recent judgement by the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) had an imprint: ‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’ (TPLT) as its header, Nigerians are curious about such happenstance that has inevitably generated storm and controversy.
“We of the Labour Party place it on record that the counsel who collected the judgement on behalf of our party and our candidate did so long after a representative of Tinubu Legal Team.”
LP called “on the PEPC and APC to come clean on the CTC imprint and disclose whose imprimatur is inscribed on the entire judgement. Nigerians deserve the right to know and are demanding urgent answers.”
In a reaction on Friday, Babatunde Ogala (SAN), one of the members of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team, explained how the imprint or watermark got onto the document.
“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 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 water-marked with the inscription – “Tinubu Presidential Legal Team ‘TPLT’” before circulating the scanned soft copies to the lawyers in our team.
“The certified true copies issued to us and other parties in the petitions by the registry do not contain the said inscription and any insinuation to the contrary is untrue.
“Counsel to 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”.
P.M. News did a comparison of the APC copy and the upload done by the Court of Appeal.
The finding was that the PEPC judgment that bears the TPLT imprint was a scanned JPEG-PDF document as against the pure PDP file uploaded on Sunday.
The Tinubu-APC document contains 798 pages, while the original uploaded by the court has 794 pages.
Here is the link to the 794-page PEPC judgment uploaded by the court: https://www.courtofappeal.gov.ng/judgment
Here is the PEPC document circulated by the APC: https://cdn.pmnewsnigeria.com/Judgment+of+the+Presidential+Election+Petition+Court..pdf