Johannesburg : Evidence pointing to possible corruption was omitted from the joint report into the multibillion-rand arms deal when it was presented to parliament.

The report exonerated the government of wrongdoing in its concluding of the deal.

Richard Young, head of the unsuccessful bidding company C2I2, believes that fresh evidence given to him by order of court significantly changes this picture.

The evidence relates to African Defence Systems (ADS).

ADS is headed by Schabir Shaik, brother of Chippy Shaik, chairman of the Project Control Board.

Draft reports released to Young include evidence about a French arms company buying out ADS and gifts made to naval officers - but these details were left out of the final report.

Young received the reports after a court ordered Auditor-General Shauket Fakie to give him documents relating to the investigation into the arms deal.

Fakie, National Director of Public Prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka and former Public Protector Selby Baqwa investigated the deal and submitted a final report to parliament.

When Young received the reports earlier this week, he discovered that two major points that appeared in the AG's draft report were left out in the final report.

The verbatim references included in the draft report but edited out were:

Gifts received - a project officer received a farewell gift of R7 000 from ADS and the receipt had not been authorised or reflected in a gift register.

A project engineer received R4 000 as a farewell gift. He bought a watch with it.

Inaccuracies in the Scopa presentation by the Department of Defence:

"Note that at the stage of the German Frigates Consortium (GFC) offer (May 1998) ADS (African Defence Systems) had not yet any connection with Thomson, and was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Altech group of companies owned by Altron."

This is followed by the statement: "This is not correct. As has been pointed out Thomson International bought the first 50% of the shares of ADS on April 24, 1998."

The possible conflict of interests, as explained later in the reports, are that Thomson was part of GFC, which was awarded the main tender for the corvettes.

Young has been locked in litigation with the government since losing the tender to supply the new navy corvettes with a combat suite, which entails command and control communication, navigation and sensor and effector systems.

Deputy President Jacob Zuma has dismissed opposition charges that cabinet meddled with the report to parliament. He said that he was not aware of cabinet instructions to change the report.

Fakie said that what was left out of the report was insignificant or under investigation by the Scorpions.

Young, however, has published a press release issued by Fakie that said media reports stating that he had left references to gifts out of his final report were "factually incorrect".

"We believe that there were 15 or 20 drafts and despite what Fakie has said we believe that it went to the president personally and he liked the public protector's draft, but not the auditor-general's draft," Young said.

He said that he had an audiotape of an interview Fakie did with a number of committees after the three reports were released.

In that interview he said that he took the report to the president to determine if there were matters of national interests that had to be taken out.

He said that he was informed that there were none, but he was asked not to use quotes from sub-committee meetings.

Fakie said that this was the "only input we received".

Young said that he had instructed his lawyers to pursue a case of perjury against Fakie.

With acknowledgements to Estelle Ellis and the Cape Times.