The People’s Alliance Party has written a letter of complaint to the Supervisor of Elections (SOE), Mohammed  Saneem. The complaint is against the FijiFirst party citing several breaches of campaign rules last Friday.

The letter refers to 15 samples of campaign materials that the FijiFirst Party had posted prominently on its Facebook page.

The People’s Alliance General Secretary, Sakiasi Ditoka, said the campaign materials do not meet the requirements that are stipulated in Section 112 (1) of the Electoral Act.

“We are contesting this year’s General Election guided by the electoral rules that have been devised by the FijiFirst Government. If the Electoral Act 2014 is the fundamental yardstick that obligates us to comply with, FijiFirst must also comply with the rules expected of other parties as well,” Mr Ditoka said.

“Namely that any campaign material published and distributed by political parties and candidates must include in a print size easily legible, the name and address of the person and organisation who authorised and paid for printing of the material; name of the company that printed the material and their business address and date of issue.

“More of these campaign materials can be viewed on the FijiFirst Political Party Facebook via this link: https://www.facebook.com/ FijiFirstOfficial. The FijiFirst Party’s posting of these flyers are clearly campaign materials given the language, pictures, diagram, photos and information they contain promoting and advertising FFP. Also, they appear only in the Party’s Facebook page and not in the official Government Facebook.”

Mr Ditoka said several FijiFirst campaign materials have been identified to have breached the requirements of the Electoral Act.

“We trust that our complaint will be given equal and fair treatment with similar complaints from other political parties, in the interest of transparency as per section 14(d) of the Electoral Act 2014,” he said.

“We ask that the Fijian Elections Office look urgently into this matter and take the necessary actions and investigation.”

Questions were sent to the Supervisor of Elections, Mohammed Saneem, and FijiFirst party General Secretary Aiyaz Sayed- Khaiyum, but no response was received when this edition went to press.

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