The state has produced new evidence relating to the origins of a notorious encrypted fax recording an alleged arms deal bribe to Deputy President Jacob Zuma. The fax first emerged in the early stages of businessman Schabir Shaik’s fraud and corruption trial in the Durban High Court.
On Friday state witness and computer forensics expert Bennie Labuschagne testified that he uncovered when and where the fax was originally typed.
The existence of a handwritten note by Alain Thetard, head of South African operations for French arms company Thomson-CSF, which appears to record a proposed R500 000 a year payment to Zuma, has been public knowledge for some time.
Thetard maintains he threw the note into a rubbish bin.
However, in her testimony to the court former Thomson secretary Susan Delique said Thetard gave her the scrawled note which she typed up in fax form, and on his instructions sent in encrypted form to the Thomson head office in Paris. Prosecutor Billy Downer also produced a printout of what Delique said was the original typed and faxed version of the note.
Shaik’s legal team contested the admissibility of the documents. The state said it was important to prove that the fax could not have been typed following Delique’s acrimonious departure from the company following a ”rather unpleasant” experience with Thetard, in which she had feared for her safety.
On Friday Labuschagne told the court the document had definitely been typed on a Thomson computer and faxed shortly thereafter.
After the lights in courtroom A were switched off, the occupants were treated to a high tech display involving a laptop, big screen, projector and a warning from judge Hillary Squires: ”Only two thirds of the people in this room are computer literate so don’t assume anything.”
Labuschagne explained how he and the state’s investigating team had made ”mirror” copies of computer hard drives and seized computer disks found in Delique’s home, the offices of Shaik’s Nkobi Holdings and Thomson-CSF and a penthouse on Durban’s Marine Parade.
Labuschagne of the company Computer Security and Forensic Solutions, said the typed version of the encrypted fax was found on a stiffy disk which was seized at Delique’s house. It was saved in a file called JZ.doc.
He said a printout of the Thomson fax machine and telephone records proved that Delique had typed and printed the document immediately from her office.
The computer seized at Delique’s home had also been examined by an expert from the defence. Last week handwriting expert, Senior Superintendent Marius Rehder, testified that the handwritten version of the notorious encrypted fax was definitely written by Thomson CSF boss Alain Thetard.
Labuschagne, who explained the strict measures in place to ensure that the disks seized were write protected and could not be altered, had also been tasked with finding an alleged R2-million revolving loan agreement between Shaik and Zuma.
He said the loan document ”had not been found on any computer or computer media seized thus far”.
The defence said that document had been faxed from Zuma’s office to Shaik in August and was originally filed in the confidential section of declararations that parliamentarians have to make. It was also proof that payments made to and from Zuma were actually loans.
The State hopes to prove that Zuma was to get the money in return for protecting Thompson and Nkobi Holdings against probes into irregularities in their acquisition of a share in the multi-billion rand arms deal.
It also hopes to prove Zuma helped the two companies secure their slice of the arms deal in the form of a tender for the electronic combat suite in the navy’s four new corvettes.
Thompson and Nkobi had a joint shareholding in African Defence Systems which was part of the German Frigate Consortium that won the tender. – Sapa