FAILED Aglandja mayoral candidate Panicos Pengas has launched an appeal before the Supreme Court against the appointment of Andreas Petrou as mayor of the Nicosia suburb last month.
Governing coalition candidate Pengas yesterday launched his appeal through his lawyer, Simos Angelides, citing improper counting of votes and failure to investigate his initial complaint as the main factors for his appeal.
On December 22, 2006, the official government gazette announced that current mayor Petrou, who was running for his fifth term, had beaten Pengas by a slender nine votes.
In his appeal, Pengas claimed that 23 unsealed voting slips were found in one of the ballot boxes, but once the counting started, he claims, the supervising official at the polling station made the call to have them sealed and considered valid.
Pengas also claimed that two extra votes were handed to Petrou in contrast to the actual number of votes in the election.
According to the appeal, submitted yesterday, Pengas is also blaming the Elections Chief Returning Officer Lazaros Savvides – who he claims did not launch an investigation when he lodged the complaint on December 19.
At the time, Savvides had claimed that there was no way of tracing the disputed voting slips, since they had been sealed and counted along with the rest.
Apart from Petrou and Savvides, Pengas has also appealed against the supervising official at the polling station, Argyri Papanastasiou.
His appeal stated that “the legal procedures for the mayoral election in Aglandja were conducted illegally and arbitrarily in their duties to a) seal all voting slips before being submitted into the ballot boxes b) only count the voting slips that were sealed before being submitted into the ballot boxes c) declare null and void 23 voting slips that were found inside the ballot boxes without the required seal…”
The appeal also noted that the electoral services had miscounted votes at two voting stations in Aglandja and that, in both cases, the electoral services had dealt with the matter differently.
Petrou, a former member of AKEL who has since been expelled from the communist party, was supported by opposition DISY.
