Defence acquisitions boss Chippy Shaikh had made no secret of the fact that his brother was involved in the armaments industry, the public hearings into the arms deal heard on Wednesday.

Jayendra Naidoo, who was appointed by then deputy president Thabo Mbeki to lead the team tasked with sweetening the deal for South Africa, said Shaikh had disclosed this as a potential conflict of interest "at an early stage".

Shaikh's brother, Shabir, is a director of African Defence Systems, one of the companies which benefited from the arms package as a sub-contractor.

He was not aware of any inducement offered to any of the members

Naidoo told the hearings, chaired by Public Protector Selby Baqwa, that this fact was also known by the ministers of finance, trade and industry, public enterprises and defence, who were intimately involved in the Strategic Defence Packages.

Naidoo said that, to his knowledge, Shaikh was the only member of the negotiating team with any potential conflict of interest.

At the time he had not paid too much attention to Shaikh's disclosure and had "never felt the need to raise this".

Naidoo testified that he was not aware of any inducement offered to any of the members of the negotiating team during their 13 months of work to conclude the final contracts with the six main suppliers.

The team comprised Naidoo, Shaikh, Vanan Pillay, director of industrial participation at the department of trade and industry, Roland White, a senior manager in the department of finance, and Llew Swan, then CEO of Armscor.

Testifying earlier, Armscor's senior manager of acquisitions, Dawie Griesel, told the hearings that all Armscor staffers involved in the process had been compelled to divulge not only interests they might have in the defence industry, but all financial interests.

Griesel said no one had been removed from the process due to a potential conflict of interest, and no one had subsequently been found to have failed to disclose any interest.

He said the evaluation of the various tenders and the final recommendation of preferred bidders to the cabinet had been structured in such a way as to ensure there could be no undue influence. "There was no space in this process for anyone to influence it," he said.

Griesel, who served as co-secretary for the Strategic Offers Committee, which co-ordinated the evaluation process, said the evaluation teams worked in isolation "so there was no cross-pollination".

Each individual member of the team did not know what the other members had scored. "So there was no possibility of any bias".

With acknowledgment to Marco Granelli and Independent Online.