Chime's Absence: Enugu Assembly Warns Group to Stop Deceiving Citizens

 

Its Speaker, Mr Eugene Odo, said on the floor of the House on Tuesday that it would apply legal means to protect the citizens from the group's activities.

Odo, who made his feelings known while concluding the plenary, noted that the lawmakers would be constrained to summon those behind the Save Enugu Group to explain under what guise they were operating.

According to him, if the group is known to law, the assembly will accord it the necessary and official status.

He said, however, that if the group was not known to law, it would be improper for the assembly to communicate with such an association.

``We want to state that it will be improper for the House of Assembly to correspond with association that have no legal backing of the law, association that have no corporate entity, associations that are not legal person and as such that its not a legal personality.

``A little investigation we made indicate that the Save Enugu Group is not an association known to the law, so we wish that those operating under this guise, should as much as possible remove the cloak of group personality and then bring themselves so that people of Enugu State can know them.

``I say this in the belief that the association wrote me demanding some documents of the house and we think that there is no document of the house that is a private document, they are all public documents that could be accessed to anybody upon proper application for certify true copy of same.

``But the house will not deal with unknown persons, the house will deal with persons who are known to the law, persons who are legal persons.’’

Odo said that efforts made to trace the supposed head office of the group showed that only the South East Zonal Office of the Civil Liberties Organisation and a law firm existed at the No. 27, Edinburgh Road, where it claimed to operate from.

He said the assembly would be interested in knowing the group’s board of trustees, registration particulars and numbers from the Corporate Affairs Commission as well as those behind the association and the legal status they operate with.