The Supreme Court of Nigeria has repealed its earlier dismissal of an appeal by GTBank against the N2.4 billion judgment given in favour of Innoson Motors Nigeria Limited by the Court of Appeal in Ibadan, Oyo State.
This judgment was delivered on Friday, by a five-man panel led by Justice Olukayode Ariwoola. They unanimously held that the Supreme Court erred in their earlier ruling on February 27, 2019, when it dismissed the appeal marked SC/694/2014 filed by GTB.
The lead judgment was written by Justice Tijani Abubakar and read by Justice Abdu Aboki. It read that the Supreme Court was misled by its Registry, which had failed to notify the sitting panel on the 27th of February that GTB had already filed its appellant’s brief of argument.
An appellant brief is a written argument presented to a higher court by the party who loses in a lower court, known as the appellant. The brief is used to try to persuade the appellate court to reverse or modify the lower court’s ruling or to order a retrial or resentencing.
The Judgement fruited from GTB’s application for a re-listing of the appeal, on grounds that it was wrongly dismissed. In response to that, the apex court attributed the dismissal of the appeal to the fact that the sitting panel was not informed of the brief, maintaining that it would not have dismissed the appeal for lack of diligent prosecution.
Relying on Order 8 Rule 16 of the Supreme Court’s Rules, Justice Abubakar, in the lead judgment, held that the apex court has the power to set aside its decision in certain circumstances, like any other court.
He maintained that such circumstances include where there is any reason to do so, where any of the parties obtained judgment either by fraud or deceit, where such a decision is void, or where it is clear that the court was misled into giving a decision.
Justice Abubakar held that the circumstances of the current GTB case fell into the category of the rare cases where the apex court could modify or alter its order because the said order or judgment did not present what it intended to record.
“I am convinced that at the material time that the appellant’s appeal was inadvertently dismissed by this court, there was a valid and subsisting brief of argument filed by the applicant. It will be unjust to visit the sin of the court’s Registry on an innocent, vigilant, proactive, and diligent litigant.
“The order dismissing the appeal was, therefore, made in error. It ought not to have been made if all materials were disclosed. The application is, therefore, meritorious and hereby succeeds,” he said.
He went on to nullify the court’s ruling of February 27, 2019, which dismissed GTB’s appeal and ordered that the appeal marked 694/2014 be re-listed “to constitute an integral part of the business of this court until its hearing and determination on the merit.”
Other members of the sitting panel are John Okoro and Helen Ogunwumiju
