Despicable Cover-Up (2)

The Judgment Debt Commission and the report emanating from it are anything but sincere and veracious. Little wonder both are as smelly as what informed the decision to empanel the Commission.

The haste to leak the report says it all about the excitement of the political establishment and the author of the report – the hatchet man who has since been rewarded for agreeing to turn the principles of law upside down.

We shudder to think that the integrity of the judiciary, the most critical bastion against the arbitrariness of bad politicians and regimes, is being compromised by a man who unfortunately does not find anything wrong with such a contemptuous and diabolic project.

We consider the Judgment Debt Commission as a mischievous political expedition driven by an obsession to witch-hunt. The still-born report lacks the factors of acceptability in civilised societies. Full of inaccuracies, it does not meet the high standards of the legal profession; and to think that such a report was authored by a man sitting on the summit of the bench makes our stomachs turn.

Public records, juxtaposed against the contents of the so-called report, reduce the latter to a mere stash of paper waiting to be shredded.

The motive of Justice Apau in neglecting the accurate records available to him in place of falsehood, which he has unfortunately presented as a report to feed the President and the people of Ghana, is as mind-boggling as it is morally abominable.

Considering the amount of state funds which supported the so-called year-long Judgment Debt Commission sitting and the quality-deficient report emanating from it, we wonder whether Justice Apau should not be the man to be held for causing financial loss to the state.

Except for reasons of personal hatred and animosity, one wonders how Justice Yaw Apau in skewing the true facts of the circumstances surrounding the Woyome judgment debt scandal, concluded that a deponent to an affidavit in support of Alfred Woyome's application for judgment in default of defence – which the Attorney General refused to contest – has an unknown identity.

Investigations by this paper so far reveal and confirm that Mrs Dora Ocquaye-Nortey, whose identity and capacity the leaked report doubted, is in fact a known legal practitioner, especially at the Commercial Court, Accra, who, at all material times to the case, was one of the lawyers of Alfred Woyome.

The impression created by the leaked report that her identity was unknown and yet the trial judge dealt with the application has once again turned out to be a false misrepresentation to the President and the people of Ghana.

As if this cat-hunting was not enough, the leaked report, in dealing with the true motive behind the constitution of the commission, chose to refuse to give the flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) the opportunity to be heard and yet proceeded to pronounce that he willfully caused financial loss to the state.

Our legal sources advise that the combined effect of Articles 62(c) and 94(4) is that the political project that Justice Yaw Apau was engaged to carry out is now complete. The effect of the commission's adverse finding that Nana Akufo-Addo had caused financial loss to the state by what the leaked commission's report described as his 'miserable failure' to defend the state in the claim by Societe Generale Bank in the Drill Ship dispute is the clearest indication yet that the job of the commission had been well cut out by Nana Akufo-Addo's political opponents even at birth.

It is all about a clandestine design to disqualify the presidential candidature of Nana Akufo-Addo – something doomed in its embryonic state. We challenge the President and his Attorney General to release the official report together with the White Paper Justice Yaw Apau has midwifed. Cry our beloved Ghana!