Justice Dery withdraws motion against Anas
A motion to stop Anas Aremeyaw Anas’s company, Tiger Eye PI, from premiering a video showing judges and court clerks taking bribes has been withdrawn.
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One of the judges caught in the video, Mr Justice Paul Uuter Dery of the High Court, had filed an application for interlocutory injunction seeking to restrain Tiger Eye PI and its agents from showing the video until a substantive suit challenging the content of the video was disposed of.
Counsel for Mr Justice Dery had gone to the High Court to move a motion for substituted service, since, according to him, three attempts to serve Tiger Eye PI had not been successful.
But the presiding judge, a Court of Appeal judge with additional responsibility as a High Court judge, Mrs Justice Gertrude Torkonoo, urged counsel for Dery, Nii Kpakpo Samoa Addo, to move all his filed applications for the speedy disposal of the case.
The court also granted Nii Addo’s application for substituted service.
Withdrawal
During the hearing, the presiding judge advised counsel to either move his application for interlocutory injunction or withdraw the motion in its entirety.
It then stood the matter down and gave Nii Addo some time to arrive at a decision.
Nii Addo, after the resumption of the court’s sitting, announced that he had withdrawn the matter against Anas.
The court, accordingly, struck out Tiger Eye PI’s name as having been withdrawn.
Nii Addo had earlier withdrawn the names of the Chief Justice and the Attorney-General as respondents in that particular application.
Following from that, their names were also struck out by the court as having been withdrawn.
Counsel did not give any reason for the withdrawal of the application against Tiger Eye PI, but it emerged after the court’s sitting that he had, indeed, filed another interlocutory injunction seeking to restrain the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC) from using its venue to screen the video.
The AICC had been served with the application, which had been billed for hearing on October 13, 2015 as of the time of going to press.
14 Circuit Court judges
Meanwhile, the case involving the 14 Circuit Court judges who filed a suit challenging the procedure adopted by the Judicial Council to investigate them as being part of the alleged bribe takers has been adjourned to Friday, September 25, 2015.
The adjournment was to enable the parties in the case to respond to filed documents.
The court had earlier dismissed a request by the state to abridge the time for the hearing of the Attorney-General Department’s application to strike out the judges’ suit.
Background
Mr Justice Dery, within a week, filed three separate applications, all aimed at stopping Anas from airing the video showing him and 33 other judges and magistrates taking bribes to compromise cases before them.
In the substantive matter, he is challenging the legality of the video, which captured him (Dery) taking bribe and so he filed an application for injunction to restrain Anas from showing the said video and a motion for contempt urging the court to imprison Anas and four others for leaking portions of the controversial video to the media.
Anas uncovered the alleged rot in a two-year investigation which also caught more than 100 members of staff of the Judicial Service, policemen and prosecutors either extorting and/or taking bribes.
