Testimony on Thursday by Julie Mahomed, legal adviser to Deputy President Jacob Zuma, brought the Durban High Court no closer to finding the elusive loan agreement signed between fraud and corruption accused Schabir Shaik and Zuma in May 1999.

A copy of the document has been presented to the court but neither Shaik, Zuma or even Mahomed seem to have the original agreement. It is not in parliament where Shaik previously said that Zuma had lodged the original document in the register of members' interests.

Mahomed started her testimony saying she clearly remembered she was asked by Zuma to draw up the document in May 1999, shortly after South Africa's general election.

The defence later pointed out that documents from the National Electoral Commission proved that the election occurred in June 1999 and that the document could have been backdated. Mahomed said she could have made a mistake.

She was in Mozambique at the time when she received a call from Zuma asking her to draw up a loan agreement and bring it to him in Durban. Zuma wanted her to consolidate two existing loans he already had from Shaik into the new agreement which he said would not exceed R2 million.

At that time Zuma had no idea how much money he owed Shaik in total but both acknowledgements of debt were already long overdue.

Mahomed said she met Zuma at the Edward Hotel in Durban where he told her to look through some of the definition clauses she had put in the agreement which was still on her laptop computer. She said Zuma did not want the agreement to be complicated.

"The important part of the document was an interest-bearing clause *1."

Other clauses which are standard in a loan agreement -- such as breach of contract, dispute resolutions, lender protection for Shaik, a notice period and provisions for repayment should Zuma's estate be sequestrated, were not included.

She said: "As long as the salient terms were recorded it was fine. I wasn't going to argue with Mister Zuma."

She met Zuma again on the Sunday at the Edward hotel where she was introduced to Shaik for the first time.

They used the hotel facilities to print the document from her laptop, Shaik and Zuma signed it and she left with the original.

In the copy before the court Schabir's name is spelt without the C and there is no provision for a witness signature. Handwritten on the copy is the date 16 May 1999 which Mahomed said could have been done by her secretary Melody when she saw the document was not dated.

Mahomed told the court that "the English is bad" and the agreement document had no paragraphs because she had no idea how to operate the automatic numbering facility on her computer. *2

She had also left an instruction for Melody to have copies made and left at the reception at her office in Johannesburg where Zuma's driver would collect them.

Mahomed said she recently had a call from Reeves Parsee, Shaik's attorney, requesting the original document. When she looked in her files she found the original was missing, and there was only a copy in its place.

"I assume my office had inadvertently sent the original and a copy with Zuma's driver."

She phoned Zuma and asked him for the original, but his state legal adviser Linda Makhathini told her to "look properly in your office".

Advocate Anton Steynberg of the prosecution team told Mahomed: "This is not the sort of agreement one normally expects to get from an attorney."

He asked her whether the agreement had not been drawn up in June and later backdated to May 16 1999. Steynberg described the document as "hastily compiled" and said: "It was never intended as a serious legal document."

Earlier on Thursday Shaik was subject to more intensive questioning this time by judge Hilary Squires.

He asked Shaik where the original was and was told either with Zuma or his attorney. He said he had "asked for it several times."

Squires asked why Zuma was not forthcoming. "He probably just mislaid it milord," mumbled Shaik. Later Squires asked: "So this original is somewhere in circulation?"

However, on Wednesday his advocate Francois van Zyl introduced a letter from the secretary to the cabinet, Frank Chikane, in which he said that Zuma had disclosed liabilities to Shaik in declarations made from 2001 till 2004 *3.

However, the contents thereof had not been lodged. On Thursday Mahomed also told the court that she had gone to Paris on behalf of Zuma when reports surfaced of an encrypted fax recording a bribe of half a million year for him from French arms company Thomson CSF. She said Zuma wanted to know if the fax really existed and if so what it contained.

Under cross-examination she said: "His [Zuma's] main concern was whether Schabir had used his name to get money from the French company." *4

The trial continues.

With acknowledgement to Wendy Jasson da Costa and Sapa.

*1 Of course, otherwise it would still be an undue benefit.

*2 It's only a one page document which could easily had been given hard numeric paragraphs numbers. Indeed, not that many lawyers don't use these hard paragraph numbers.

*3 Too late, major wonga had already been disbursed by then and the NPA had been investigating since late 2000 (from after the AG's Special Review published in September 2000).

*4 Busted - Schabir is not meant to know anything about either the fax or getting money from the French for other than the Jacob Zuma Education Trust.

If the defence was implausible while stating their clients' case during the state's case, as well as during their first witness's testimony, it's is now a hilarious, albeit rather rancid, porridge.

Bring on the escargot.