Arms deal truth must out

The explosive information in last week's Sunday Times - that French arms company Thales allegedly bribed President Jacob Zuma with money, gifts and travel and also made a €1-million donation to the ANC (about R14-million at today's rate) - confirms what many South Africans have believed for years. It raises further serious questions about the Seriti commission of inquiry into the arms deal.

In 1999, the government decided to spend between R60-billion and R70-billion on weapons that we did not need and have under-utilised. Most of the contracts were questionably awarded and tainted by allegations of corruption.

For instance, British police claim that the British arms maker BAE Systems paid £115-million (R2-billion) in "commissions" for its lucrative contract to supply trainer jets, which was awarded despite serious air force reservations.

As the senior ANC member of parliament's public accounts committee, Scopa, I was involved in trying to investigate the deal in which the auditor-general suggested there was prima facie evidence of wrongdoing.

The ANC leadership tried to persuade me to abandon our proposed investigation. The Presidency despatched a number of ministers and fellow MPs to exert pressure on me as a "loyal comrade".

Most in the ANC were publicly and privately critical of what I was doing, but one person was encouraging: then deputy president Jacob Zuma. In meetings at his office late at night and in the parliamentary precinct during sittings, Zuma exhorted me to press on with the investigation, stating that he believed we were fulfilling our constitutional responsibility.

His support continued for a few months and then suddenly he would no longer have any contact with me. Instead, in a letter written by Thabo Mbeki but signed by Zuma, he excoriated the committee for engaging in a "fishing expedition" against "prestigious international" arms companies.

I was confused by Zuma's blatant inconsistency. After I was removed from the public accounts committee by the ANC, to be replaced by yea-sayers who voted down the committee's involvement in the inquiry, and after being forced out of parliament, I continued to investigate the deal, and wrote a book about it.

I discovered that Zuma's "financial adviser", Schabir Shaik, had arranged for the French company Thales (then known as Thomson CSF), which was bidding for a major contract on the deal, to pay Zuma R500000 a year.

Interestingly, this agreement was signed on January 1 2001, after which I never heard from Zuma again.

Initially I thought that Zuma had supported Scopa and me in a bid to further undermine a weak p resident Mbeki, who had chaired the committee that made the key decisions on the arms deal, but I now wondered whether Zuma's motives were even more nefarious.

Was it pure coincidence that Zuma abandoned Scopa and me just a few days after the proposed agreement was sent by Shaik to Thales?

I even began to think that perhaps Zuma and Shaik had used Scopa and me to up the ante on the French arms company to pay up, on the assumption that they could put a lid on the investigation once their French friends had delivered.

It is worth bearing in mind that Shaik was found guilty of corrupting Zuma. And it was under Zuma's presidency that Shaik was granted a highly controversial medical parole less than two years into a 15-year sentence.

The more than 200 counts of corruption, fraud and racketeering against Zuma in relation to Shaik's activities were controversially dropped just before his election to the presidency, primarily on the basis of the so-called spy tape recordings of conversations between the heads of the National Prosecuting Authority and the Scorpions Investigative Unit.

It was Judge Willie Seriti who authorised the wire taps that resulted in these recordings - the same judge who now chairs the commission of inquiry into the ill-fated arms deal. I am not suggesting any link between the two roles, but, just as the wire taps were highly controversial, so too is the commission.

The Seriti commission was only established by the president under pressure from a court action undertaken by arms deal activist Terry Crawford-Browne. Since its inception it has been dogged by the resignations of senior staff members and lawyers, some of whom have accused it of having a double agenda: to whitewash the arms deal and discredit critics of the deal.

My experience of the commission, along with that of my colleagues Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren, has reinforced these concerns.

Despite our willingness to help it - including making a substantial early submission with evidentiary documents - the commission has made it very difficult to engage with it about the corruption allegations.

The commission has failed to meaningfully cross-examine supporters of the deal and made it almost impossible for anyone else to do so effectively; it has, by its own admission, not accessed or read huge amounts of crucial material relating to the deal; it has refused to provide us with relevant documents that our initial subpoenas entitled us to; and, most importantly, it has refused to admit key documents that provide crucial evidence of malfeasance.

We no longer believe the commission has any interest in properly investigating wrongdoing in the arms deal and have, therefore, withdrawn from it.

Worryingly, while the commission conveniently fails to focus on the evidence of corruption, and has intimated that we have no evidence to give, it has, subsequent to our withdrawal, summonsed fellow anti-corruption activist Van Vuuren to testify at the commission on October 20, but to what end?

The Sunday Times revelations last week would, under normal circumstances, be fully investigated by a commission of inquiry such as the one chaired by Seriti.

But given that the chairman has ruled that only those personally involved in corruption can speak to it, this is unlikely to happen, rendering disingenuous the ANC's response that the Sunday Times should take its findings to the Seriti commission.

In response to the Sunday Times report, even former defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota, after years of denying that there was any wrongdoing in the deal, says that Jacob Zuma is guilty of corruption.

The information unearthed by the Sunday Times confirms my experience of events in investigating the arms deal, including allegations of bribery on the part of Zuma as well as the claim made to me by a then senior member of the ANC National Executive Committee that the party itself had benefited from the deal.

The commission has stated that it will not subpoena the ANC, a position that is even less tenable now.

The time has come to scrap the expensive, non-performing Seriti commission and to ensure that the significant evidence of corruption in the arms deal, as unearthed by the Sunday Times and others (see armsdealfacts.com), is placed before a court of law where those accused will either defend themselves or face the legal consequences of their actions.

• Feinstein, a former ANC MP, is the author of After the Party and The Shadow World. He is the director of Corruption Watch UK

Published on 06 October 2014