High Court Judge Jo-Ann Barlow will on Monday, August 9, rule on an application by Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Keith Lowenfield who is seeking to bar PPP/C GECOM Commissioners Bibi Shadick and Sase Gunraj from voting on a motion tabled by them, to dismiss him.
Nigel Hughes, the lawyer for the CEO, filed the case earlier this month at the High Court in Demerara. In June, PPP/C GECOM Commissioners Sase Gunraj and Bibi Shadick tabled a motion containing 20 grounds on which they called for the immediate firing of Lowenfield.
Gunraj and Shadick – both lawyers – submitted that Lowenfield has breached his functions, duties, responsibilities, and obligations regarding the March 2020 General and Regional Elections. Following the tabling of the motion, Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission, Retired Judge Claudette Singh wrote to Lowenfield, asking him to show cause why he should not be fired.
He was subsequently instructed by the Chairperson to proceed on annual leave. At the High Court, Lowenfield argued that the participation of Gunraj and Shadick in the deliberations of their own complaint against him is in breach of the rules of natural justice.
He argued too that their participation in the deliberations on their own complaint against him infected the deliberation of GECOM with bias. He deposed that after he submitted his show cause response to Justice Singh, Gunraj and Shadick met to deliberate on the process upon which the Commission should proceed.
“The participation of Gunraj and Shadick in the deliberations of their own complaint was in breach of the rules of natural justice,” Lowenfield added.
As such, the CEO contended that the participation of the Commissioners in the hearing of the motion they filed against him is a breach of the implied terms of his employment because he is entitled to a fair hearing of his response to any complaint of gross misconduct made against him.
Against this backdrop, he is asking the High Court to grant an order restraining Gunraj and Shadick from voting on the motion to dismiss him.
Meanwhile, a team of special prosecutors has been hired to prosecute the electoral fraud charges against Lowenfield, Deputy Chief Elections Officer Roxane Myers, Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, GECOM clerks Denise Bob-Cummings and Michelle Miller, GECOM Elections Officer Shefern February and Information Technology Officer Enrique Livan, APNU/AFC activist Carol Joseph, and People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) Chairperson and former Public Health Minister Volda Lawrence.
The more than 25 matters are currently before three Magistrates – Chief Magistrate Ann McLennan and Magistrates Sherdel Isaacs-Marcus and Leron Daly. Lowenfield’s election report claimed that the APNU/AFC coalition garnered 171,825 votes while the PPP/C gained 166,343 votes at the March 2, 2020 National and Regional Elections.
How he arrived at those figures is still unknown as the certified results from the recount exercise supervised by GECOM and a high-level team from the Caribbean Community (Caricom) pellucidly showed that the PPP/C won with 233,336 votes while the coalition garnered 217,920.
The recount exercise also proved that Mingo heavily inflated the figures in Region Four – Guyana’s largest voting District – in favour of the then caretaker APNU/AFC regime.
