Tribunal judgment copies: PDP and APC legal teams fight over watermark

On Saturday, President Bola Tinubu’s camp and that of Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar clashed over the watermark on the copy of the judgement of the Presidential Elections Petition Court that had gone viral on Friday.

According to Sunday PUNCH, some commentators and social media users noticed that the Certified True Copy of the court’s judgement that went viral bore the watermark of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team.

On Wednesday, after hearing appeals related to the presidential election for 12 hours, the PEPC affirmed the election of the President who ran on the All Progressives Congress ticket.

Both Atiku and Labour Party member Peter Obi had vowed to appeal the court’s decision all the way to the Supreme Court.

Atiku’s team yesterday joined those who criticised the viral CTC for featuring the President’s legal team’s watermark.

The camp issued a statement through the former Vice President’s Special Assistant on Public Communications, Mr. Phrank Shaibu, demanding an explanation from the PEPC for the watermark’s appearance on the viral copy.

After needlessly delaying providing PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar and his legal team with a Certified True Copy of its judgement, the PEPC must explain to Nigerians and the world why copies of the judgement bear the header of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team, according to the statement.

We don’t want to start a fight, but the PEPC needs to explain to Nigerians why it put the respondents’ header on the CTC copy of their judgement but not on the copies that went to the petitioners.

Is it because the Tinubu legal team is favoured in some way that this happened? The court must provide an explanation.

“It is very clear that many questions are begging for answers,” the court said, “including why the PEPC decided to avail the respondents, especially the Tinubu legal team, to have a first receipt of the CTC of the judgement before the plaintiffs.”

It was more urgent for the petitioners to have the document to cause an appeal to the Supreme Court within 14 days, but Shaibu said Nigerians would want to know why the PEPC gave the Tinubu legal team first custody of copies of the judgement.

He continued, “Developments since the court’s ruling raise questions about whether or not the Tinubu Legal Team rendered secretarial assistance to the PEPC.” How, then, did the ‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’ manage to insert themselves into what was purportedly a document from the Court of Appeal of Nigeria?

“‘Tinubu Presidential Legal Team’ on the top left of each of the 798 pages is neither a monochrome nor a metadata. It’s a header, so unless there’s a good reason otherwise, it was probably written by the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team.

The Court of Appeal of Nigeria’s stamp is the only emblem that should have been on the CTC copy of the judgement document, so the PEPC must explain why it included the Tinubu Legal Team’s header instead.

Team President Reacts

Meanwhile, in a statement released yesterday, Coordinator of the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team Babatunde Ogala slammed critics for suggesting the watermark was the result of pre-determined manipulations.

In addition, he contradicted Shaibu by saying that the President’s team wasn’t the one who picked up the first copy of the judgement, but rather the PDP.

Ogala stated that after retrieving the judgement from the Court of Appeal, the team watermarked their copy and shared scanned copies amongst themselves.

A portion of the statement reads as follows: “After the Court of Appeal delivered judgement in the three election petitions on September 6, 2023, the court directed its registry to make physical copies of same available on September 7, 2023.”

“Therefore, the Tinubu Presidential Legal Team applied for and paid for a Certified True Copy of the aforementioned Judgement.

“PDP solicitors picked up the same judgement at the registry as ours at the same time.”

The PDP’s designated representative picked up the first copy from the registry.

After retrieving our copy, we scanned it and watermarked it with the words “Tinubu Presidential Legal Team TPLT,” then shared the digital files with the other attorneys on our team.

No such inscription appears on the registry’s Certified True Copy provided to us and the other parties named in the petitions, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

The petitioners’ attorneys have access to the same certified copies of the judgement that we do, so they will know that the rumours circulating about them are false, cruel, unfair, and unfortunate.