Former deputy president Jacob Zuma on Tuesday said he had been ”tried and convicted” together with convicted fraudster Schabir Shaik even though he had never appeared in the dock.
Zuma on Tuesday filed papers in the Pietermaritzburg High Court in response to the state’s replying affidavits that seek a postponement of his corruption trial as well as answer his application for a permanent stay of prosecution.
He said the ”elements” of the charges were different to the charges which Shaik was found guilty of in July 2005 by Judge Hilary Squires.
”Nevertheless, in the public eye, I was tried and convicted with Shaik. My sentence was publicly pronounced by the president in the joint sitting of the houses of Parliament on 14 June 2005.”
Zuma said the state had failed to address ”crucial issues” in his application for a permanent stay of prosecution and asked the court to rule large parts of the state’s affidavits and many of the annexures inadmissible because they ”are highly prejudicial” to him.
He said the state had failed to explain the delay in prosecuting him and the impact it had on him and his family.
He accused the state of a ”cynical abuse of power”.
Zuma accused the state of doing an ”about-turn” when it filed its affidavits seeking a postponement of his corruption trial.
Zuma said the state had sought to postpone the trial because of the outstanding appeals on search and seizure raids; the outstanding appeal of Shaik; the finalising of requests for documents from Mauritius; and a forensic audit from KPMG.
He said state advocate Leonard McCarthy’s affidavit that the state was prepared to proceed with the case against him even though the appeals of the search and seizure raids had not been finalised was an ”about-turn”.
”Protestations of indignation and outrage spew forth from the mouths of senior officials past and present, of the National Prosecuting Authority and the national Ministry of Justice. Yet their howls of innocence, when subjected to analysis, are shrill and hollow.”
He dismissed the state’s attempts to keep his identity secret during investigations as ”absurd” and ”naïve”.
”The state must have known full-well that it is impossible for the state to investigate the matter, summon a firm of international auditors, employees and directors of accused two and three, as well as Shaik, and carry out simultaneous raids in four different countries in October 2001, without accompanying rumour and speculation that I, as Deputy President of South Africa, was the main focus of the investigation,” he said in the affidavit.
Referring to the impact of the investigation on him and his family, Zuma accused former National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka of electing to ”embark upon his own private counter-intelligence campaign to disseminate information from the sources which he clearly thought would favour him”.
He goes further to say that ”the inference is inescapable that he [Ngcuka] has an axe to grind”.
In his affidavit Zuma said he that if he could not win a permanent stay of prosecution, he would then seek to separate his trial from that of his co-accused Thint and Thint (Southern Africa), both subsidiaries of the French arms manufacturer Thales.
He would also seek to get an order limiting the state to documents that are not in dispute and to prevent any further investigations.
He said any delays in the state’s case had nothing to do with him, but that ”they are the author of their own difficulties”.
He also accused the state of going to ”enormous lengths to conceal” the alleged encrypted fax from his defence team.
”The purported explanation advanced for the state’s reluctance to provide me with a copy of the alleged handwritten version of the document runs contrary to any notion of common sense or logic.”
The decision to charge the Thales subsidiaries was done, Zuma said, ”simply to advance a case against me”.
”It was not a prosecution aimed at primarily a conviction against the French corporate bodies.”
The two Thint companies were charged in November 2005 while Zuma was charged in June 2005. – Sapa