“The jungle is neutral so I have the right to execute my skill but in your instance, I couldn’t do it because it’s a family.” This, was the exact message Richard Jakpa says he delivered to his cousin, Justice Emmanuel Yonni Kulendi, when he called him after hearing his name in the ongoing ambulance procurement trial.
Jakpa says the Supreme Court judge called him when he heard he (Kulendi) was involved in the engagement between him (Jakpa) and the Attorney-General, Godfred Yeboah Dame.
The businessman has explained that he told the judge he conceived the idea of recording the A-G when he decided to call and speak to him one-on-one. He notes although the duo met several times in his cousin the Supreme Court judge’s house, he never recorded him because he knew that was a safe place for him.
However, Mr. Jakpa says he knew they were at the jungle when the A-G placed a call to him outside his cousin’s residence to deal with him personally.
“When they accused him that they believed that the recording was done in his house, he called me as a junior brother. I went to him and he put that question to me and I said senior brother, I have my code of ethics that I will not break.
“I cannot record in your house because your house is a safe place for me and for whoever comes in from our family so I will not break with this certification so long as the AG kept coming to your house to engage me, he was safe. I couldn’t do anything,” Jakpa told journalists Thursday, June 27, 2024 after proceedings in court.
Jakpa continued that when Godfred Dame “went out of his way because he couldn’t get what he wanted in your (Kulendi) house and now he was engaging me one-on-one, direct on phone” he said the situation changed since that’s “an open field. The jungle is neutral so I have the right to execute my skill but in your instance, I couldn’t do it because it’s a family. There are certain rules that you must apply in family meetings. You can’t break those rules,” he noted, adding that, “so, in Justice Yonny Kulendi’s house, nothing was ever recorded.
Jakpa has insisted he never in any way brought the Supreme Court judge into the matter but rather the NPP who made their preemptive allegations which didn’t suffice.
“It was the prosecution that mentioned his name in court and continued on air through their media surrogate. Because they were thinking that the recording that I had made, they thought the recording was made in Justice Yonny Kulendi’s house initially so they were preempting it because the recording had not yet been played.
“So they thought the recording was made in Justice Kulendi’s house because the AG knew very well that he had met me in Justice Kulendi’s house on several occasions and we’ve had meetings,” he explained.
Ambulance trial: Dame’s comment about crumbled case a sign of desperation – Justice Abdulai
