A British foreign correspondent, once sent by his newspaper to Vietnam to cover some new turn in the war there, was rerouted to Moscow on arrival in Saigon. Moscow was so cold he felt compelled to buy himself a fur coat for a large sum of money.

On his return, he submitted his expenses and his managers threw their hands up in horror. They eventually paid him but he was in hot water. Until his editor sent him off again to some cold clime. On his return to London, his manager saw him in the corridor. "Welcome back," he said waving the man's expense claim. "I see no fur coat this time!" The journalist waved back cheerily. "It's in there somewhere," he smiled.

And if you look really really hard, you might find the ghosts of some of the things in Shauket Fakie's last draft report on the arms deal in the final report he made to Parliament.

But that's editing for you. You move paragraphs. You cut things out. You rewrite them. You have an idea in your mind of what you want the final product to look like.

Here's an example. Fakie says that the final report "makes it clear that the date of Thomson-CSF obtaining an interest in ADS was the previous month" and that the relevant statement in the final report reads "In April 1998 Thomson CSF acquired 50% of Altech and the remaining 50% in February 1999."

But what is not clear is what that information looked like in the draft prepared for the auditor-general by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The draft has a section with the heading Inaccuracies in the (defence department) Presentation to Scopa, the heading was itself removed from the final report. It says below in the draft that "In the Scopa presentation, under the heading proof of the German Frigate (Consortium GFC) intention to form a vessel contractor with ADS for the supply of corvettes, the following is stated' Note that at the stage of the GFC offer (i.e. May 1998) ADS had not yet any connection with Thomson, and was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Altech group of companies, in turn owned by Altron. "This is not correct. As has been pointed out, Thomson International bought the first 50% of the shares of ADS on 24 April 1998."

Now why not just leave it like that? What the editor does here is, first, to remove the value judgment. In the draft, this information indicates a bad thing. In the final report, it is at worst neutral. Second, the reference is removed from the findings section of the auditor-general's draft, and buried in the background section of the final report. That could not happen without a conscious decision being made to do it. At the very least, we could now be told why.

May or April, what's the difference? Well, Chippy Shaik was head of defence procurement when the false information was given to the public accounts committee (Scopa). His brother, Schabir, was part of the Thomson bid to supply a combat suite to the corvettes the navy was ordering. But did Schabir and Thomson buy ADS (African Defence Systems, a nominated supplier for various elements of the combat suite) before or after the German Frigate Consortium (which was to build the corvettes) invited ADS to join its bid? If it was after, as the false testimony to Scopa stated, there was no conflict of interest for the Shaik brothers. But it wasn't, it was before. In fact, the purchase of half of ADS by Thomson was effective on March 1 1998.

The auditor-general could have made that point but he didn't. In fact, he dissembled it and pretty well destroyed it. I don't know whether he did it on purpose but Scopa should be allowed to ask him.

There are many similar queries one could raise in response to Fakie's reply to our coverage. The gifts, organised by Thomson, to naval project officers and reported in the draft, are not mentioned in the final report; the explanation they were to be investigated does not hold water.

Fact is that heavy, careful editing of the drafts took place. And mostly it served, wittingly or otherwise, to hide the fortunes bestowed on the business interests of Schabir Shaik, brother of the chief of defence procurement and a close confidant of Deputy President Jacob Zuma.

Bruce is Business Day Editor.

With acknowledgement to Peter Bruce and the Business Day.