Chairman of the opposition All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in Abia State, Rev. Augustine Ehiemere, has openly denied authoring or having knowledge of the serial newspaper advertorials in which APGA accused the judges of the Election Petition Tribunal of having been bribed and compromised with property in far away America to give judgment in favour of candidates of the Peoples Demcratic Party (PDP).

He made the denial now at the ongoing session of the tribunal for the final adoption of written addresses by the parties involved in the gubernatorial election contest.

Since last week, APGA has been running newspaper campaigns and series of press conferences, questioning unfavourable tribunal judgements. In a full page advertorial published on page 41 of The Nation Newspaper of Friday, October 16, 2015, and purportedly signed by Ehiemere as the chairman of APGA, he declared as follows: “Huge sums of money in form of gratification have exchanged hands between the PDP leadership in the state and cronies of the justices. Consequently, some of the judges have been responding in line with the dictate of the lucre as evidenced in the current dismissing of all petitions filed by our party against the PDP candidates. The bribe funds, we understood, were delivered to the judges outside the country and through proxies in order to leave no traces.”

APGA went further to call for the trial, jailing and execution of the jurist, in another full-page advertorial entitled ‘Abia Election Petition Tribunals; The Height of Travesty of Justice’, published on page 47 of The Nation of the same date. According to it, “There should be no space for corrupt judges in the present Nigeria. It is not enough to just retire them, they must be tried and if found guilty, jailed or even shot to death as the people of Ghana are asking their president to do.”

On Sunday, October 18, in another full-page advertorial published on page 10 of The Nation, APGA fired again: “In the last few weeks, suspicious but serious moves involving the officials of the Abia State Government have been made across the borders of Nigeria to seek a possible and highly secretive way of compromising the judges either in cash or through the purchase of very expensive property.”

But, this morning in the open tribunal, Ehiemere denied knowledge of the advertorials.

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