TUESDAY, 3.30PM:
TRANSKEI attorney-general Christo Nel today told the National Assembly’s justice committee that he dropped his bribery prosecution of casino king Sol Kerzner and former Cape Town mayor David Bloomberg because one of his key witnesses had died and another, former Transkei prime minister George Matanzima, was “belligerent, unreliable and obstreperous”.
Nel said Matanzima will not be prosecuted for receiving a R2-million bribe from Kerzner, in spite of his reneging on an earlier promise to co-operate with the state as a witness in return for indemnity from prosecution. Nel said he had arranged for Matanzima’s early release from a seven-year prison term for an unrelated bribery conviction and promised Matanzima indemnity from prosecution if he turned state witness in the Kerzner case.
However, once out of jail, Matanzima had gone back on his word. When asked why he did not then prosecute Matanzima, Nel replied that he had “no evidence to put him away”. He added that Matanzima’s earlier statement as a state witness could not stand alone and would need corroboration, and that it would have been “no less than foolish” of him to go to court with a witness who put a gloss on his own participation in events, especially when his fickleness was a matter of public record. Matanzima’s character would have been mercilessly flayed by the defence in a criminal trial and Nel would have faced the prospect of having to discredit his principal witness or having him declared hostile.
Nel said that in the meantime other witnesses’ memories appeared to have dimmed and another key witness, Monty Ntoloko, had died in 1991, while testimony from another, unnamed, witness had since been contradicted. Nel said it appeared that any prosecution of Kerzner and Bloomberg would not have gone beyond the first stage of establishing an answerable case. “Time has overhauled us here,” Nel told the committee. “As a legal man I can’t in good conscience approach any country for extradition without any realisable hope of a successful prosecution.”