Documents submitted by Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate for the 2023 election, were accepted as evidence by the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in order to support his appeal against President Bola Tinubu.
In front of the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, which is seated in Abuja, Mr. Peter Obi, the presidential candidate for the Labour Party, summoned his first witness today.
Obi has claimed that President Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, was the beneficiary of a vote-rigging scheme in the February 25 presidential election.
The first witness for Obi, Mr. Lawrence Nwakaeti, identified a document relevant to a court case in the United States of America, USA, about Tinubu’s purported indictment in a drug-related matter. Mr. Nwakaeti informed the court that he is from Ihiala in the Anambra state.
Nwakaeti’s deposition included documents that included information about the claimed $460,000 forfeiture by Tinubu to the US authorities.
The fact that Tinubu “at the time of the election was not qualified to contest for election to the office of President as he was fined the sum of $460,000 for an offence involving dishonesty, namely narcotics trafficking imposed by the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, in Case No: 93C 4483,” is one of the grounds on which the LP and Obi are praying for the court to annul Tinubu’s victory.
President Tinubu and the governing All Progressives Congress, APC, said they were adamantly opposed to the document’s acceptability.
However, Tinubu and the APC stated that they would save their arguments against the document for their closing briefs of argument.
As a result, the paper was accepted into evidence by the five-member panel chaired by Judge Haruna Tsammani and designated as Exhibit PA-5.
