Shaik witness did not want to be involved

Former Thomson CSF secretary Susan Delique told the Durban High Court on Tuesday she initially informed the Scorpions she did not want to get involved in their investigation.

Delique, the state’s third witness in the Schabir Shaik fraud and corruption trial, said she was concerned over the seriousness of the allegations in the probe.

Time had also passed since the alleged transgressions, and her own life had moved on.

Delique said she was first telephoned by the Scorpions in June 2001. When making an affidavit, she did not hand over a relevant fax to them because she thought she had lost it.

Delique earlier told the court that Thomson CSF’s South African head of operations, Alain Thetard, gave her the note when he returned from a meeting with Shaik and Zuma in Durban in March 2000.

She said she typed out the note, which was in French, and sent it as an encrypted fax to the Thomson CSF head office in Paris.

In September 2004, she found a disk containing a letter, and contacted the Scorpions.

After the letter was discovered, the Scorpions made a copy of her computer’s hard drive, Delique said.

Prosecutor Billy Downer questioned Delique about her computer knowledge, asking whether she knows how documents are identified on a computer.

Delique also testified that she knew Bianca Singh, the state’s second witness and former personal assistant to Shaik.

Although they had never personally met, they had been in touch by telephone and fax. But after she left Thomson, they were never in contact again.

Earlier, a hand-written note — in which a French arms company representative records an agreement on an alleged R500 000-a-year bribe to Deputy President Jacob Zuma — was presented as evidence to the court.

Shaik’s legal team has contested the admissibility of the document and will argue the issue at the end of the state’s case.

From Thetard, the typed version of the note is addressed to Thomson CSF’s sales director for Africa, Jann de Jomaron, and headed ”Subject: JZ/S.Shaik”.

It reads: ”Dear Jann: following on our interview held on 30/9/1999 with S. Shaik in Durban and my conversation held on 10/11/1999 with Mr J.P. Perrier in Paris I have been able (at last) to meet JZ in Durban on the 11 of this month, during a private interview in the presence of SS.

”I had asked for SS to obtain from JZ a clear confirmation or, at least, an encoded declaration (in a code defined by me) in order to validate the request by SS at the end of September 1999. This was done by JZ (in an encoded form).

”May I remind you of the two main objectives of the ‘effort’ requested of Thompson CSF are:

The state hopes to prove that Zuma was to get the money in return for protecting Thompson CSF and Shaik’s company Nkobi Holdings against probes into irregularities in the multibillion-rand arms deal.

It also hopes to prove Zuma helped the two companies secure a multimillion-rand slice of the arms deal in the form of a tender for the combat suite in the navy’s four new corvettes.

Thomson CSF won the tender, and then shared it with Nkobi via a joint venture, African Defence Systems — the ”ADS” in the encrypted fax.

The court earlier heard evidence from Shaik’s former personal assistant that Shaik had expressed alarm at the prospect of the Heath special investigative unit probing the arms deal.

As he handed up the handwritten letter, prosecutor Downer told Judge Hilary Squires that Shaik’s advocate, Francois van Zyl, had warned he would object to the admissibility of the document.

Downer said the state will argue that it is admissible on a number of grounds, including the fact that it is a statement made in the execution of a plan and in furtherance of a conspiracy, and on the grounds that it should be seen as an exception to the rule against hearsay evidence.

He and Van Zyl proposed the document be admitted provisionally so that the matter could be argued at the end of the state’s case, Downer said.

Squires said that in general a document has to be ”proved” by its author before it can be admitted as evidence, but agreed to admit it provisionally.

Thetard is on the state’s witness list, but is highly unlikely to testify.

He did give an interview to the Scorpions at an early stage of the investigation, but is now in France and appears unlikely to return for the Durban case.

A member of the prosecution team said it cannot subpoena Thetard in France, and France does not extradite its own citizens. — Sapa