Pretoria - The investigation into the R66 billion arms transaction has encountered yet another rough patch during the past week when President Thabo Mbeki and the four ministers involved threw back the draft report concerning the forensic investigation.

The report, consisting of about 800 pages, is at present being hurriedly rewritten before it is printed as part of the comprehensive report to be tabled in Parliament at the end of the month.

The Auditor-General gave the instruction to use private auditors in the forensic investigation. The Public Protector simultaneously conducted his own indepth investigation, while the national prosecution authority did its own investigation according to criminal law.

The draft report was distributed this week to Messrs Trevor Manuel, Minister of Finance; Alec Erwin, Minister of Trade and Industry; Mosiuoa Lekota, Minister of Defence and Jeff Radebe, Minister of Public Accounts as well as Mbeki.

It is understood that the five were satisfied with the report by the prosecution authority and that of the Public Protector, but not with that of the Auditor-General.

The Auditor-General, Mr Shauket Fakie, stated through a spokesperson that his team follows the "prescribed process" within the mandate of the investigation.... "everything possible is being done to reach the deadline". He didn’t want to comment on the latest problems.

For the past few days, the team has been working steadfastly and throughout the night with the support of Adv. Stoffel Fourie, chief of the Public Protector’s investigation, to write the report. Fourie also compiled the Public Protector’s report.

Apparently, the problem is that the forensic investigators thought certain persons to be guilty and that evidence needed to be found.

Feedback from the ministers and Mbeki was that a comprehensive investigation into all aspects of the transaction was requested and that that was exactly what they would want to see in the final report.

Yesterday some of the investigators said that they doubted whether the report could be "written correctly" if the approach was not right. They are also concerned that ministers are pressurising the investigators to write a report with a similar conclusion.

The forensic investigators stated that they had handed over a summary of their investigation and that the alleged irregularities are contained within the complete report.

The contract for the forensic investigation was outsourced with a budget of R6 million, while the entire investigation’s budget is running at about R13 million.

With acknowledgment to Erika Gibson, Die Burger and News24.