The Chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Danladi Umar’s threat to imprison some journalists for alleged misrepresentation of the proceedings in the trial of the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Walter Onnoghen, has proved to be based on a wrong premise, our correspondent reports.
A Certified True Copy of the tribunal’s record of proceedings showed that Umar wrongly accused journalists of misrepresenting the March 18, 2019 proceedings on Onnoghen’s trial.
The CCT’s record bears the signature and official stamp of the tribunal’s Director of Legal, BintuGarba A.
Umar had, during the proceedings of March 21, 2019, accused three newspapers – The Guardian, The Pilot and ThisDay— of misrepresenting certain aspect of the proceedings of March 18.
The CCT chairman attended the March 21 proceedings with the copies of the editions of the newspapers, where he read aloud the headlines on the front pages.
According to Umar, contrary to the reports contained in the March 19, 2019 editions of the newspapers, the defence, led by Chief AdegboyegaAwomolo (SAN), did not accuse the Federal Government of tampering with certain assets declaration forms submitted to the Code of Conduct Bureau by Onnoghen.
He alleged that the newspapers “falsely reported” on their front pages that the defence had accused the Federal Government of “tampering with” Onnoghen’s assets declaration form when, according to him, the defence only alleged that the form was in a “loose form.”
Reacting to what he described as the newspapers’ “distortion and misrepresentation of the last proceedings of the trial,” he threatened that any journalist who commits such infraction again might have to remain in prison until his retirement in 28 years’ time.