Our Reporter, Abuja
The Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, in Abuja has dealt a fatal blow to the the petition filed by Peter Obi of the Labour Party challenging the election of President Bola Tinubu by dismissing it.
Haruna Tsammani leading the five-member bench, dismissed the petition saying it lacked in merit on Wednesday.
After resolving all three grounds on which the case was built against Mr Obi and his party, the Labour Party, and in favour of Mr Tinubu and other respondents to the case, the court dismissed the petition.
Mr Tsammani held that the Obi and the Labour Party failed to prove the allegations that Mr Tinubu was not qualified to contest the 25 presidential election.
He further ruled that the $460,000 forfeiture order of a US court issued against Mr Tinubu in relation to a drug trafficking case in 1993 did not amount to a criminal conviction that could have possibly led to his disqualification from running for the presidency.
Tsamani also ruled that they failed to prove that the election was marred by corrupt practices such as over-voting, suppression of votes, inflation of votes, wrong computation of votes and allegations of votes.
The court also held that the argument of Labour Party’s lawyers that Mr Tinubu should not be declared winner of the election because he scored less than 25 per cent votes in the FCT is “fallacious and incredibly ridiculous.”
The court held that the Supreme Court had previously ruled that FCT should be treated as if it were one of the states of the federation.
“It (FCT) is not superior or inferior to other states of the federation,” the judge held.
Ikengaonline had reported that the court earlier dismissed the petition by the APM.
At the time of filing this report, the court was reading its judgement on the petition filed by Atiku Abubakar and the PDP.
