Copy of PEPC’s judgement with Tinubu legal team’s header stirs controversy

A controversy has ensued over a copy of the judgement of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) circulating online with its pages bearing the inscription of President Bola Tinubu’s legal team.

Phrank Shaibu, a media aide to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, raised questions on the matter in a statement on Saturday.

Mr Shaibu said the court “must explain to Nigerians and the world why the header of Tinubu Presidential Legal Team was on CTC copies of its judgment”, feeding rife perception among the supporters of opposition candidates that the court was biased in favour of President Bola Tinubu.

Although, without giving any evidence, Mr Shaibu also reechoed speculations that spread online for weeks that some legal experts within the All Progressives Congress (APC) contributed to the drafting of the judgement.

But Babatunde Ogala, the coordinator of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team (TPLP) – the umbrella body of the battery of lawyers that defended Mr Tinubu’s election victory at the PEPC – has dismissed widespread concerns about the controversial copy of the judgement as unfounded insinuations.

A certified true copy of the judgement with the marking, ‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’, appearing on the top right corner of its 798 pages surfaced online on Saturday, days after the court delivered the verdict in an over-12-hour-long proceeding on Wednesday.

The five-member court unanimously dismissed all three petitions challenging Mr Tinubu’s victory in the 25 February election in its Wednesday judgement.

Two of the petitions were filed by the leading opposition candidates – Atiku and the Labour Party’s Peter Obi.

They have both rejected the judgement and vowed to challenge it at the Supreme Court.

“After causing needless delay in availing the PDP presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar and his legal team Certified True Copies of its judgment, the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) must explain to Nigerians and the world ambiguities around why copies of the judgement bear the header of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team,” Mr Shaibu wrote Saturday.

Shaibu’s queries

Mr Shaibu queried why Mr Tinubu’s legal team was able to receive a copy of the judgement ahead of Atiku’s team which first made a request for it in open court immediately after the panel of five justices finished reading the verdict late Wednesday night.

“The curiosity is more confounding based on the fact that the lead counsel to Atiku and the PDP had pleaded in the open court to have express receipt of the judgment, to which Justice Haruna Tsammani agreed to and promised to make the document available the following day, which was Thursday.

“Nigerians want to know why the PEPC confers special privileges to the Tinubu Legal Team by making them have a first custody of copies of the PEPC judgment, even though it was more urgent for the Petitioners who needed the document in order to cause an appeal to the Supreme Court within 14 days including weekends,” he wrote.

He added that it took the lead counsel for Atiku and the PDP to write a second letter to the court, following an earlier one sent on Thursday, before the petitioners could get the judgement on Friday, hours after, he said, Mr Tinubu’s team already had custody of it.

He suggested, although without providing proof, that the delay in releasing the judgement to the petitioners could only have been caused by the need to remove the ‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’ header on the copy allegedly issued earlier by the court and was already circulating in the public.

“Moreover, we have it on good authority that when the PEPC was informed that the CTC copies of the judgment given to the Respondents were already circulating in the public domain with the header of TPLT on it, a further delay was necessitated by the need for it to undertake a laundry of the documents by removing the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team header before handing over same to the lawyers of Atiku.

“Whereas the legal team of the PDP and Atiku have statutory 14 days to prepare its appeal to the Supreme Court, the PEPC had erased 2 days out of that 14 days, no thanks to the PEPC whose Chairman, Justice Tsamani had promised to make available the CTC copy of the judgment to Atiku a day after its judgement was rendered, which ought to have been on Thursday,” Mr Shaibu said.

He suggested that “unfolding developments after the court’s ruling elicit suspicions about whether or not the Tinubu Legal Team provided clerical services to the PEPC.”

“Otherwise, how and when did the ‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’ creep into a document that was supposed to be the official document of the Court of Appeal of Nigeria,” Mr Shaibu added.

He also suggested, although no proof was provided, that the Tinubu legal team’s header on the viral copy of the judgement meant that, “except for a valid explanation, the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team is the originator of the document.”

The allegation of an external person writing the judgement for the panel of judges came up before the judgement was delivered on Wednesday.

The speculation was rife on the internet in the weeks preceding the verdict, but no evidence was given to back it up.

The immediate-past Minister of Works and former governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Fashola, who is a senior advocate, had to deny online speculations that he was drafting the then yet-to-be-delivered verdict for the panel.

Mr Shaibu wondered again on Saturday whether the controversial copy of the judgement in circulation implied that “the Tinubu Legal Team is deemed to be accorded special privileges?”

He also recalled that in the course of delivering its judgement, “the PEPC had spoken of the petition it was ruling upon in a vexatious and denigrating language as if it was a crime to bring a case of electoral banditry before the court.”

“The PEPC must, on its honour if indeed it still has any, clarify why the court chose to put the header of the Tinubu Legal Team on a CTC copy of its judgment document, while the only emblem that should have been on the document is the stamp of the Court of Appeal of Nigeria,” he said.

He added that “Nigerians and the world are earnestly waiting for answers” to the posers he had raised as the legal challenge shifts to the Supreme Court.

Mr Shaibu, who doubled down on the claim of widespread fraud during the disputed election, which he referred to as “the electoral banditry of February 25”, said Atiku decided to appeal to the Supreme Court against Wednesday’s verdict as “our last-ditch effort to salvage our country and deepen our democracy.”

“Against the background of the decimation of nearly all of the institutions of state including the Independent National Electoral Commission which dragged us into this quagmire, our intent is to ensure that the judiciary, the last hope of the common man, does not go to the dogs,” he said.

Tinubu’s legal team reacts

Meanwhile, Mr Ogala, a SAN, who coordinates Mr Tinubu’s legal team, called the marking an “innocuous watermark” in a statement on Saturday. Mr Shaibu insisted that the inscription was not a watermark but a header signifying the bearer’s authorship of the document.

Mr Ogala said his team applied and paid the necessary fees for a certified true copy of the judgement just like the petitioners.

He said representatives of his team were at the court’s registry in Abuja at the same time as PDP’s lawyers to receive the certified true copy of the judgement, and that, contrary to Mr Shaibu’s claim, the opposition party’s lawyers received the first copy released by the court.

He maintained that the copies of the judgement released by the court’s registry did not have his team’s inscription.

“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,” he stated.

He also described the issues made out of the copy of the judgement as “mischievous” necessitating the need for him to issue a clarification.