By Robert A. Emmanuel and Charminae George
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Following the High Court’s dismissal of the election petition, the legal team representing Kelvin “Shugy” Simon expressed confidence in their ability to have the judge in the matter rule in his favour.
Yesterday, Simon, his attorneys and executive members of the United Progressive Party (UPP) held a press conference at the chambers of Lake, Kentish and Bennett.
Kendrickson “Kenny” Kentish, one of the five lawyers representing the former MP for St Mary’s South, told the media that having looked at the arguments filed by both sides, they were confident that the case would’ve been ruled in their favour.
“At case management, the court ordered each party to file their witness statements, the documentary evidence, and written legal submissions, and both sides filed those documents.
“Having assessed all those documents, we were fully satisfied that the petitioner had not made out a sufficient argument, either for disqualification, or for the event that there was a disqualification that [Samantha] Marshall should be sworn in as the representative,” he said.
Kentish argued that “in an election petition challenge where the petitioner is saying that the respondent, the successful candidate, was in fact disqualified, the court has to determine whether or not the person was [actually] disqualified; that is the first issue.
“It is only if there is a determination that the successful candidate was in fact disqualified, that the court then has to determine what happens next, whether it is a byelection or the person with the second highest number of votes automatically gets sworn in, the court has set up a particular test as to resolve that issue,” he said.
The lawyer added that, in his opinion, the petitioner would have had to prove that it was well known and “notorious” within St Mary’s South that their client was disqualified.
“We happen to think, having assessed the evidence, that the petitioner was not going to succeed on that issue and that it was likely that the court was going to order a by-election,” Kentish said.
Former MP Simon announced his resignation from his post as the parliamentary representative for St Mary’s South constituency on June 7. By law, Simon’s resignation prompts a by-election to be held within 120 days.
Simon said that he vacated the seat to prevent the constituents from being negatively impacted by the lengthy legal battle he anticipated would have ensued.
The legal battle referenced is the January election petition that was filed on behalf of the ABLP, for the St Mary’s South constituency, which ABLP candidate Samantha Marshall contested in the last general elections.
Kentish said that the legal team did not enter the legal proceeding with any arrogance, but rather only sought to vigorously defend their client.
“In a legal process, there’s always going to be a winner and a loser, and nobody can say who is going to win and who is going to lose. When we went to court, we did not go in knowing what the outcome was going to be.
“The best that anyone could do is that having regard to your training and experience, make an educated guess as to what you think is the likely outcome, and that’s what we did in this particular case.
The petition questioned Simon’s eligibility to be elected as a member of parliament as he was still a civil servant at the time of his nomination.
He later resigned from his post two weeks before the January 18 elections.