Durban businessman Schabir Shaik said he generally paid only a tiny percentage of his company's turnover to Deputy President Jacob Zuma.

But forensic auditor Johan van der Walt was not impressed during proceedings in Shaik's Durban High Court trial yesterday, saying a company's turnover meant little - but its bank accounts a lot *1.

Shaik has pleaded not guilty to charges of corruption and fraud.

Advocate Francois van Zyl SC, for Shaik, has indicated that he would wrap up his cross-examination of Van der Walt, who has spent 16 days in the witness box, on Monday.

Van Zyl said they would dispute Van der Walt's evidence that the financial existence of Shaik's Nkobi group of companies was threatened by the payments to Zuma.

He produced a document explaining that Shaik had paid, at most, 6% of the Nkobi group's turnover to Zuma.

Van der Walt replied: "One can have a billion-rand turnover and still have an overdraft. If you don't have the money, you can't operate."

Van Zyl further said Shaik would testify that as far as he knew, Zuma was in a much stronger financial position than what had been reflected in Van der Walt's evidence.

Van der Walt replied that his evidence was given to show that Zuma had received a number of benefits through payments from Shaik, including "being rescued from sequestration".

Van Zyl also said Shaik would tell the court that his financial director, Colin Isaacs, was a chartered accountant and that he had trusted his and the company's auditors' value judgments *2 to ensure that nothing was wrong in the books.

He further said that when Shaik was informed that there was a problem in the books, he had had it corrected.

"Yes, but if one looks at Nkobi's books, it was Shaik who benefited directly and indirectly from the write-off," Van der Walt replied.

With acknowledgements to Estelle Ellis and The Star.

*1 Simplistic Financial Management I

*2 In GAAP, it actually works the other way round, the external auditors trust at face value the financial information that is presented to them by the company's directors.