Seriti ruling puts paid to Jacob Zuma’s claim of innocence

In a precedent-setting ruling, the high court in Pretoria has set aside judge Willie Seriti’s findings that there was no evidence of corruption in the arms deal, effectively neutralising one of former president Jacob Zuma’s key arguments in his fight to permanently stop his corruption prosecution.

Judge president Dunstan Mlambo and judges Dennis Davis and Mashangu Monica Leeuw said the Seriti commission, which cost taxpayers R137m, was supposed to “bring finality to a controversy which has bedevilled SA almost from the dawn of democracy”.

They, however, raised concerns about the way in which Seriti dismissed evidence of corruption in the multibillion-rand arms acquisition emanating from testimony in the corruption trial of Zuma’s former financial adviser Schabir Shaik.

The judges questioned why the commission had accepted evidence that former president Thabo Mbeki “played no part in the awarding of contracts to Thomson-CSF”, the arms company accused of bribing Zuma, “despite evidence of an encrypted fax which implicated him in the awarding of the Thomson-CSF contract”, as well as evidence from company official Pierre Moynot that Mbeki had given assurances that it would get that contract.

Mbeki has denied any wrongdoing.

Mlambo further said that Seriti’s decision to exclude the record of Shaik’s trial for corrupting Zuma from his inquiry was “inexplicable”.

He questioned why the Seriti commission failed to interrogate former head of arms deal procurement Chippy Shaik, the brother of Schabir Shaik, about evidence that suggested he and Zuma had directly intervened to persuade Thompson-CSF (later known as Thales) to include Schabir Shaik’s Nkobi Holdings as a shareholder in the SA company through which it operated — African Defence Systems.

Thompson-CSF was awarded a lucrative contract for the supply of combat systems to the SA navy.

Zuma is facing charges that he accepted a R500,000 a year bribe in exchange for protecting Thomson CSF/Thales from any potential investigation into the arms deal. Zuma has repeatedly raised Seriti’s findings, which included his determination that a number of arms deal critics, including Patricia de Lille, a state witness against Zuma, failed to “provide any credible evidence to substantiate any allegation of fraud or corruption against any person or entity”.

But in a unanimous ruling, Mlambo and his fellow judges agreed with arguments advanced by nongovernmental organisations Corruption Watch and Right2Know that the commission “failed to carry out the task assigned to it under the constitution and within the framework of the principles of legality”.

Mlambo stressed that the court’s decision was “not concerned with the legality or otherwise” of the arms deal, “but only with the manner in which the commission conducted its proceedings and arrived at its findings”.

He and his fellow judges raised serious questions about why the commission failed to properly question Chippy Shaik and arms deal adviser Fana Hlongwane about evidence that they had received multimillion-rand bribes from the German Frigate Consortium and BAE Systems, respectively.

Hlongwane, a close friend of Zuma’s son Duduzane, was named by former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas as a witness to an attempt by a Gupta brother to bribe and threaten him into taking over the finance minister position from Nhlanhla Nene — and doing the family’s bidding. Hlongwane has denied this and says he will testify at the state capture inquiry and clear his name.

Mlambo pointed to evidence by the then Scorpions unit that there was a “reasonable suspicion” that Hlongwane was implicated in racketeering, corruption, money laundering and fraud in relation to “overt and covert” payments totalling over R231m from BAE.

But, he said, Hlongwane was “asked only a single question regarding these allegations to which he responded in broad generality without referring to any specific document, allegation or evidence”.

“Given the welter of allegations contained in material in the possession of the commission against [Chippy Shaik and Hlongwane], it failed to confront these witnesses with these serious allegations which were made against both in respect of corruption and wrongdoing”.