Defence contractor Richard Young claimed yesterday transcripts of a two-day hearing in Parliament on the controversial arms deal investigation had not been properly recorded and were not available for public record.

In a letter to former standing committee on public accounts chairman Gavin Woods, Young said he had tried to obtain transcripts of the December 4 and 5 session, where the heads of the joint investigating team were quizzed by MPs.

He stated he had received a draft transcript, which was not ready for publication and unusable because of "the different styles used by the numerous typists, plethora of typographical and spelling errors, general wordprocessing inadequacies and lack of contiguity between sections applying to the different audio tapes used for the recordings".

Young said that since January he had been trying to obtain a final or updated version of the transcripts from Parliament's secretarial services.

At first they claimed to be updating the draft, but later advised "they had been instructed there was no need for these transcripts and to refrain from completing or publishing a final version", he wrote. "I must assert that I, as a citizen and taxpayer, find this latest turn of events most disturbing and quite unacceptable."

"We pay taxes partly to ensure the effective running of the institutions required to support our constitutional democracy and Parliament is surely the most important of these," the letter states.

Young urged Woods to bring the matter to the attention of National Assembly speaker Frene Ginwala so that the situation could be rectified at once.

His company, CCII Systems, lost out on a contract in the multibillion arms deal.

Refer to Article : Parliamentary Transcripts Flawed and Unusable

With acknowledgements to Sapa and Business Day.