A member of the governing National Democratic Congress’ (NDC) legal team, Mr. Chris Ackumey, has claimed that embattled Supreme Court Judge, Justice Anin Yeboah, once blurted out in the open, at a funeral service that “those Ashantis who belong to the NDC are way off target”.
Adducing evidence to support fellow Lawyer, Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata’s accusation of the Judge of political bias as far as the hearing of the just-determined election petition case was concerned, Mr. Ackumey told Radio XYZ’s news analysis programme, ‘The Analyst’ on Saturday September 7, 2013, that Justice Anin Yeboah made the anti-NDC comment at a gathering in Nkawie in the Ashanti region last year.
According to him, the Enquirer Newspaper published three stories in that regard.
He said the paper quoted Justice Anin Yeboah as having said that: “If the NDC won the election, he was going to resign as a Supreme Court Judge”.
“…It was put in the public domain by the Enquirer…and the person who reported the issue was one Kufuor, who is a cousin [to] former President Kufuor”, Mr. Ackumey noted.
Mr. Ackumey, who belongs to a group of Lawyers that calls itself Lawyers in Search of Democracy (LINSOD), insisted that he conducted his personal investigations to confirm whether Justice Anin Yeboah, indeed, made the alleged anti-NDC comments attributed to him by the Enquirer Newspaper.
He said his findings were affirmative.
He wondered why Justice Anin Yeboah never used the platform provided by the election petition hearing, to dispel the claims made by the Enquirer publications, just as some of his fellow Justices on the nine-member panel that heard the case did when issues concerning their alleged and suspected political affiliations cropped up prior to the hearing of the substantive case.
“Anin Yeboah has never never come out to dispel or question that kind of [allegation]. Even when the forum was created for him by Atuguba and Dotse, he never took advantage of it”.
He challenged Justice Anin Yeboah to “come and deny that at that funeral last year at Nkawie, he didn’t make that statement”.
“That was total indiscretion”, he condemned.
Mr. Ackumey said the alleged comments were confirmed by not only the Reporter, but also the Registrar or Principal of Kumasi Polytechnic, who was allegedly, also privy to the same anti-NDC comments purportedly made by Justice Anin Yeboah at the said funeral.
He claimed the Enquirer Reporter later received so many calls from some people who “advised him to stop what he was doing because he was going to damage the reputation of Anin Yeboah”.