Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s legal adviser Julie Mahomed went into the witness box at the Schabir Shaik fraud and corruption trial in the Durban High Court on Thursday.
She has testified about a loan agreement that she drew up between Zuma and Shaik in May 1999. Mahomed said she was in Mozambique after the election when she received a phone call from Zuma, asking her to go to Durban to draw up the agreement.
She said Zuma wanted her to consolidate two existing loans he already had from Shaik into the new agreement, which he said would not exceed R2-million.
Mahomed said she met Zuma at the Edward hotel in Durban, where he told her to look through some of the definition clauses she had put in the agreement, which was still on her laptop computer. She said Zuma did not want the agreement to be complicated.
”The important part of the document was an interest-bearing clause,” said Mahomed.
She said the next day — a Sunday morning — she went to Zuma’s official residence at King’s House in Durban, where the security guard at the gate told her the meeting had been moved back to the Edward hotel.
It was then that she met Shaik for the first time. He and Zuma then signed the loan agreement document, she said. She left with the original.
Shaik’s advocate, Francois van Zyl, asked her why Schabir was spelled without a ”c” in the loan agreement. She said it was unusual to spell Schabir with a ”c”, which is why she had left it out.
Hand-written on the copy before the court was the date May 16 1999, the day the agreement came into effect. Mahomed said the date was probably written in by her secretary, who saw that the document had not been dated.
She said she had also left an instruction for her secretary to have copies made and left at the reception at her office in Johannesburg, where Zuma’s driver would collect them.
Mahomed said she recently had a call from Reeves Parsee, Shaik’s attorney, requesting the original document. When she looked in her files, she found the original was missing, and there was only a copy in its place.
”I assume my office had inadvertently sent the original and a copy with Zuma’s driver.”
She phoned Zuma and asked him for the original, but his state legal adviser, Linda Makhathini, told her to ”look properly in your office”.
Mahomed first became Zuma’s lawyer in the early 1990s when he returned from exile and a special trust for returnees, the Batlage Trust, was begun to help them with their children’s school fees. — Sapa