If South African President Thabo Mbeki had met high-ranking executives of a French arms company — when he was still deputy president — that would not have been problematic, Public Enterprises Minister Alec Erwin said on Thursday.
In a debate with Independent Democrats (ID) leader Patricia de Lille on the South African arms deal on John Perlman’s show on the SAfm radio station, Erwin was asked specifically if Mbeki as deputy president had met high-ranking executives of Thomson CSF ”would that have been problematic?”
He answered: ”Certainly not, the times we are talking about, if you study the [arms deal] process, it makes the timing irrelevant, they [the company] have a wide range of interests.”
Erwin, who was previously minister of Trade and Industry, said at the time the government was ”was not dealing with that level of decision making”.
Asked why the president was himself not responding to the questions arising about this possible meeting, he said he was ”sure the president will address that”, but added that he could not find any reference — to the meeting — ”in any of our records”.
Asked repeatedly about whether this meant that Mbeki had never met the arms dealers, Erwin ignored the question and continued to answer another question.
De Lille noted that the Minister in the Presidency Essop Pahad had initially not remembered that the president had met with the arms dealers but had subsequently changed his mind.
Thomson CSF — now known as Thint — and its African Defence Systems was part
of the German Frigate Consortium which won the corvette contract, led by the German firm Thyssen.
De Lille also said she hoped that the one lesson that could be learnt was that international experience had shown that arms companies raised prices because of ”the nuisance of offsets” — required investments by arms companies to win the contracts. She noted that various governments had been rocked by arms deal scandals including Italy, Germany and Saudi Arabia. ”One is dealing with an arms industry … that are a lot of crooks,” she charged. – I-Net Bridge