Cape Town Parliament's joint rules committee has ordered a halt to the shredding of parliamentary documents after the discovery that declarations made by former transport minister Mac Maharaj were destroyed in 2000.

National Assembly speaker Frene Ginwala raised the issue of the destruction of parliamentary records in the committee yesterday and suggested that the shredding had to stop urgently.

The destruction of the records makes it impossible to check whether Maharaj declared in the confidential section of his declaration of interests some of the gifts he is alleged to have received.

The confidential side of the register would also have shown whether Maharaj declared payments his wife, Zarina received, apparently for work for Durban businessman Schabir Shaik.

A recent Deloitte & Touche investigation found that Maharaj failed to declare a family trip to Disneyworld in the US as a gift in the public part of the register.

Ginwala told yesterday's meeting the ethics committee had decided on its own in 1997 to shred documents from the confidential record one year after MPs left Parliament. Maharaj left in June 1999, so his records were destroyed in June 2000.

Ginwala said the ethics committee had failed to refer its decision to the National Assembly for ratification as it should have.

Ginwala also complained that since Parliament returned to work after the winter recess, two attempts had been made to hold meetings of the ethics committee, but this could not happen because there was no quorum. "We cannot show that we are serious about combating corruption if the ethics committee is inquorate in a normal committee period."

With acknowledgements to Wyndham Hartley and the Business Day.