Fiji: Rejected party fights back

The proposed Fiji United Freedom Party intends to seek further clarification with the registrar of political parties following the rejection of its application to register as a political party last week.

Confirming this, the proposed party’s president Jagath Karunaratne said his team was adamant to get the proposed party registered.

“Yes, we received a letter from them on Friday to do with invalid voter IDs and some names appearing in other parties,” Karunaratne said.

“We are seeking clarifications further, we want to go and check where the anomalies are but at the moment our people are on the ground collecting some more signatures.

“So we are looking at finding out the options that we have – whether we can continue with the current registration process or we have to resubmit the whole thing,” he said.

“But whatever it takes, we are going to do whatever it takes to get it submitted again.”

Karunaratne said the proposed party was doing everything to register the proposed party.

He said the proposed party had a bit of a history behind its formation which would be revealed after its registration.

Registrar of political parties Mohammed Saneem said that during the analysis of the application last Friday, it was discovered that the applicant did not provide the minimum required number of member.

Saneem said of the 5489 signatures provided with the application, only 3822 members were valid for the purposes of the application.