Defence advocate Francois van Zyl on Thursday attacked the credibility of Susan Delique, the only state witness who testified about the origin of the infamous encrypted fax at Schabir Shaik’s fraud and corruption trial in the Durban High Court.
Van Zyl started contesting the admissibility of several documents submitted as evidence by the state and said the fax cannot and should not be accepted ”as an executive statement in furtherance of a common purpose”.
Delique, a former employer at French arms company Thomson CSF in South Africa, claimed she was given a handwritten note by her boss, Alain Thetard, which recorded a bribe of R500 000 per annum for Deputy President Jacob Zuma.
She told the court she had typed up the note and, on instruction from Thetard, faxed an encrypted form to Jean de Jomarron and JP Perrier, the Thomson bosses in France and Mauritius.
On Thursday, Van Zyl said Delique had made contradictory statements about the faxing of the document and that ”not all her versions can be true”.
He said it was strange that the encrypted fax was not found anywhere else, despite simultaneous search and seizure operations in South Africa, Mauritius and France.
Van Zyl said it was strange that when an angry Delique resigned from Thomson she just grabbed everything that was on her desk and that this included the hand-written note and a disk containing a typed version.
He said it was clear from Delique’s behaviour that she didn’t want to testify in court but that she eventually had to because things ”spiralled out of control”.
The state previously called a handwriting expert Superintendent Marius Rheeder to the stand, and he confirmed that the handwritten note had definitely been altered by Thetard. – Sapa