Durban — Judge Hilary Squires yesterday gave Schabir Shaik an effective 15-year jail sentence and a R3,9m fine, saying he deserved a long incarceration after losing his “moral compass and scruples”.

As a depressed Shaik faced the prospect of years behind bars, an embattled Deputy President Jacob Zuma continued his fight against calls for him to step down. Shaik’s sentence and Zuma’s no-holds-barred fightback came as President Thabo Mbeki flies back to SA today from Chile to take the toughest decision of his presidency: to fire Zuma or keep him in his cabinet.

Mbeki promised before his departure that he would announce his decision on Zuma when he returned.

Zuma could get the sack after Squires found that he had a “generally corrupt” relationship with Shaik.

Last week, Squires accepted the state’s version that Shaik paid bribes to Zuma in return for the deputy president’s support in his business ventures.

The judge sentenced Shaik to the minimum prescribed sentence of 15 years on each of the two corruption counts.

He found mitigating circumstances for not imposing the same minimum penalty for the fraud charge, saying Shaik had not been the instigator.

He gave Shaik three years for fraud. The three sentences will run concurrently.

The judge also imposed an array of fines on 10 companies in Shaik’s Nkobi stable. He said Nkobi Holdings, Nkobi Investments, Kobifin, Kobitech and Kobitech Transport Systems were financially able to pay fines. The rest were given suspended fines.

The fines are in addition to the R30m in assets Shaik must hand over to the Asset Forfeiture Unit by tomorrow as wealth obtained via illegal means.

The judge set aside July 26 as the date for hearing an application by Shaik and the companies for leave to appeal.

Squires rejected arguments in mitigation of sentence, saying: “His corporate empire’s progress and prosperity was plainly linked to the possibility that Zuma would finally ascend to the highest political office.”

“What was important to him was the achievement of a large multicorporate business group … and the power that goes with that and close association with the greatest in the land. It is precisely in such circumstances that corruption works,” he said.

Shaik gave Zuma “a sustained level of support” designed to sustain a lifestyle the politician could not otherwise afford, Squires said.

This was an investment into Zuma’s political profile, from which Shaik expected to benefit. “These were not payments to a low-salaried bureaucrat seduced into temptation,” he said. The higher the status of the beneficiary, the judge said, the more serious the offence.

Squires dismissed Shaik’s anti-apartheid “struggle credentials”, saying what he had sought to achieve was exactly the same as the apartheid regime’s “command of the economy” by a privileged few — exactly that which the struggle had sought to replace.

He pulled no punches, likening corruption to a cancer “eating away at the corporate fabric” and “violating human rights”.

When the Shaik trial began eight months ago, Squires told the court that it had made “the first step in a journey of a thousand miles”.

Yesterday he returned to the same image, telling the court it had reached the “final step in a journey of a thousand miles”.

With acknowledgements to Nicola Jenvey and the Business Day.