KPOH JAILED

By William Yaw Owusu

Tuesday September 11, 2007
NAPOLEAN B.K. Kpoh, who until last August was the General Secretary of the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union (ICU), was yesterday jailed for a month for contempt of court.

An Accra Fast Track High Court held that Kpoh had defied its ruling on August 20, which restrained him from holding himself as the General Secretary of the union.

The motion for contempt filed by the National Executive Council (NEC) of ICU, flouted the orders of the court and went to the ICU offices to work as General Secretary, and whilst there, he ordered the workers not to obey the NEC, after which he locked the main door and left.

They also said he granted interviews to the media claiming that he had filed a notice of Appeal and another motion for stay of execution and on that basis, he could act as the General Secretary.

Convicting him, the court presided over by Justice K. Anto Ofori-Attah, said “Mr Kpoh cannot treat the court’s orders the way he likes.”

It said Kpoh made “dangerous propositions” in his affidavit in support of the defence he filed to purge himself of the contempt motion initiated by the NEC.

Kpoh had argued that he could not be removed from office because there was an automatic seven-day period within which he could ask for stay of execution of the order, but the judge described it as “capably erroneous.

“At the time he filed the motion for stay of execution and the notice of appeal, the restraining orders were still effective,” the judge said, adding: “the authority of the court and the sanctity of the process must be preserved at all times.

“The filing of those notices do not wipe away the force of the court’s ruling. The advice by his counsel was demonstrably wrong,” the judge said.

The court said that the NEC was able to establish beyond reasonable doubt that Kpoh went to the ICU offices in spite of the court’s orders adding that “his intentions may have been good but that did not mean he is not in contempt. He set himself to trivialize the orders of the court”.

Before sentence was pronounced, Mr. Christoph Kofi Koka, counsel for Kpoh, had aplogised for his client’s conduct, adding that “we have purged ourselves and handed over everything including the vehicle to the ICU.

However, Mr. Albert Adaare, representing the NEC, prayed the court to convict Kpoh to serve as a deterrent to others.

The leadership struggle in the ICU started on August 2, when the NEC, declared at a meeting that Kpoh and Mr. Ahmed Yussuf Salifu, chairman of the union, had both been removed on the basis that their tenure of office had expired.

The NEC then went ahead to appoint an Interim Management Committee to steer the affairs of the union until the next congress.

The purported removal of the two resulted in a joint writ being filed on August 6 by Kpoh and Mr. Salifu to halt the action of the NEC, as well as a counter writ by the NEC seeking to restrain the two persons from holding themselves as officers of the union.

The court on August 20, upheld the NEC’s motion and restrained Kpoh and Salifu from holding themselves as executives of the union because their tenure of office had expired.