Mayor’s lawyer said Limassol recount should be rejected

Lawyers argued on Friday that an application relating to an appeal against the result of last December’s mayoral election in Limassol lacked specificity and should be rejected by the court.

Limassol Mayor Nicos Nicolaides’ lawyer said the application to disclose election documents, including ballots, did not make any reference to any specific events, as the law and the regulations required.

“This lack of specificity shows that the application for details and inspection is done to plug this gap, and as we claimed, it leads to the rejection of the recount application,” Andreas Angelides said.

The plaintiffs, former mayor Andreas Christou, his party Akel, and other supporters, filed for a recount after he lost with just nine votes.

As part of the process, they have requested the documents of the election, including a number of ballots they claimed should have been counted in Christou’s favour, as well as 434 ballots deemed void.

They argue that there was no uniformity on the criteria applied by the over 100 polling station supervisors regarding null votes.

They claim there was evidence pointing to a number of ballots ticked for Christou being erroneously marked as void while others, which should have been marked as void were instead counted for Nicolaides. The plaintiffs have stressed they were not implying there was malice.

The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Chrysostomos Nicolaou, argued that their application included specific claims proving their position.

“To save time it is better to issue the disclosure order and from then on we will define our position accordingly,” he said, adding that it wasn’t logical to call witnesses to testify without the ballots.

The state and Nicolaides’ defence, countered that both the recount and the disclosure applications should be rejected.

They claimed that from the moment no objection had been raised during the count, one could not ask the court to reverse the people’s mandate with vague arguments.

The court adjourned for April 11.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.