As Billy Downer SC sat with his team in a restaurant at Ushaka Sea World yesterday, a glass of good white wine in hand and a plate of sushi before him, he spoke about 'undoubtedly the most difficult case' of his career. Special Writer Estelle Ellis chatted to him and his team.

They have probably never noticed but they always walked in the same formation to court: lead prosecutor Billy Downer SC in front, flanked by his second-in-command Anton Steynberg, followed by their colleague Santhos Manilall with investigators Johan du Plooy and Isak Plooy bringing up the rear.

Their mission was never to get a conviction. It was to bring their case before court, ask a judge to adjudicate and give Schabir Shaik a fair trial.

The fact that they got what prosecutors called a "full house" of convictions and a very stringent sentence was a tribute to what Downer calls the "extraordinary dedication and passion" of his team. It took them almost two years, from the day Downer got involved in the investigation to the day that they came to court for the first time.

"I remember that I was at a braai at a friend's house in February 2001. It was a Saturday night. Leonard McCarthy (the boss of the Scorpions) phoned me and said I must come to Pretoria. (Downer is based in Cape Town). He said he had something I would like."

By then former director of public prosecutions Bulelani Ngcuka had put together a team to investigate the arms deal. One of the central figures in the team was Gerda Ferreira *1, a close friend of Downer.

Downer agreed to look at the "conflict of interest" part of the investigation as it was mostly based on paperwork that would allow him to stay in his beloved Cape Town while doing it. This part of the investigation involved two personae who Downer would get to know very well: brothers Chippy and Schabir Shaik.

"We started looking at it, but we could not find much. We went looking with the expectation of finding nothing. Bulelani (Ngcuka) said, 'That's fine'. Then one rainy afternoon in April, I opened a file of Arthur Anderson's audit papers and I found a couple of e-mails that talked about a bribe and French arms company Thomson.

"Months after that we found the first payments of school fees by Shaik on behalf of Deputy President Jacob Zuma.

"After we found those two or three payments to Sacred Heart College, we jumped up and down - we had a case of corruption, we told each other. What we did not know was that there were 235 more payments to be found.

"By then we knew of a woman called Sue Delique, but we thought she was in France. Eventually one of our investigators Graham Dawes *1 tracked her down. We went to talk to her, but she would not give us the fax.

"In July that year she phoned. 'I have the fax *2,' she said.

"We went to see Sue in her tiny little cottage. And there were cats walking all over the fax. Sue and I are both cat lovers, but Gerda went berserk. I'm sure she was scared a cat was going to pee on the encrypted fax. I knew that what was written in the fax was the truth."

The encrypted fax would later form the backbone of the conviction brought by Judge Hilary Squires on a charge of corruption. The judge found the fax was a true reflection of a bribe agreement with French arms company Thomson, brokered by Shaik and agreed to by Zuma.

"During the Hefer Commission, the National Prosecuting Authority had been accused of leaking information to the press. Not a single press leak came from our team. The papers from which the first story about the fax was written were attached to Shaik's own papers when he took us to court about the searches," Downer says.

"A feature of this case," he adds, "was that we perfected the art of doing the impossible. We broke all old prosecutorial standards. Where we used to say, 'We can't do this, it's too expensive', we now said, 'Let's try.' "

In October senior special investigator Johan du Plooy, one of the veterans of the arms deal investigation, joined the team again, this time to organise simultaneous searches of premises in Durban, France and Mauritius. It all took place on October 9 under great secrecy, with Du Plooy keeping a watchful eye in Durban, Downer going to Mauritius and Ferreira in France.

"We never before thought to do things this way," Downer says.

"When I knew what had to be done, I said: 'I want Johan and nobody else,' " Downer says.

"Yes," Steynberg interjects, "he stamped his little feet and it all just happened."

Isak du Plooy, no relation to Johan du Plooy, was the other investigator appointed to help Downer when they started questioning potential witnesses. Fresh from the Scorpions academy, Isak, who has an LLB degree, somehow, says Downer, "miraculously" got all the information together that they needed.

It was only later that Downer met Shaik, who, he said, had always "treated me civilly".

In August 2003, just before Ngcuka would give his controversial press conference announcing that Shaik would be prosecuted and Zuma would not, Steynberg, who his colleagues describe as "frighteningly intelligent" was brought on board.

"There was a concern that because of Billy's involvement in the searches in Mauritius, Billy might be asked to give evidence or be barred from continuing (with the prosecution) at all ... that is why I was asked to join," Steynberg says.

"Apparently we have met before," Steynberg says laughing. "We were at the same school."

The two attended Pretoria Boys High - "Or is that Tshwane Boys High?" the ever sharp-witted Steynberg asks.

Steynberg brought Santhos Manilall on board, who would later be credited with keeping the court documents in order and for his analysis of the court record.

"Once I got involved," Steynberg says, "there was no turning back. The first thing I did was to suggest that we needed an independent auditor.

"I immediately said I want Johan van der Walt *1. I knew him from Fundstrust, his work on Allan Boesak's case and he was one of the founding members of Oseo (the Office for Serious Economic Offences). We left them alone to do their job. We gave them access to the safe and said: 'Make up your own minds.' "

It would only be two years later in September 2004 that Downer could finally tear himself and his team away from their other work to pay their full attention to the job at hand.

"I think that was the most difficult part," Downer says.

"We only really did this part-time until September. I had to run the Asset Forfeiture cases and the plea-bargaining pilot project in Cape Town. That project has the best statistics in the country. We are the best in the country *3," he boasts.

One of Steynberg's other tasks was to secure the evidence of David Wilson, former employee of the Malaysian construction company Renong, and one of the integral parts of their case to prove that there was a corrupt relationship between Shaik and Zuma.

"Wilson is a man of such integrity," Steynberg says. "He was truly offended by what happened. He was such a precise and meticulous person with no ulterior motives. I was delighted when his affidavit was admitted and became an integral part of Count 1.

"At the beginning of the trial I said to the two Du Plooys, 'Get ready. We must keep the case going.' The smooth running of the prosecution's case is all thanks to them."

"But Judge Squires kept us guessing right up to the end. It is the mark of a remarkable judge," Downer says.

He also pays tribute to the advice and help of Guido Penzhorn, lead prosecutor in the Lesotho Water Highlands cases *4, who came on board as a consultant.

"He was the first person from the outside who said we had a good case. There were even people in the National Prosecuting Authority who doubted us. He gave this sense of confidence," Downer says.

"This case," Steynberg says, "proves what can be done if the prosecution is properly staffed and funded."

Downer says he took no pleasure in having brought about the fall of the Durban businessman.

"I look at these things from an intellectual point of view *5," he says.

"If the crime and the sentence are in relation to each other, then what happened is correct," Downer says.

With ackowledgements to Estelle Ellis and the Cape Argus.

*1 Major contributors + Riaan Beekman of KPMG.

*2 Actually, The Fax.

*3 The competition from the other divisions of the AFU hasn't always been too onerous, either for the Cape Town division or for the forteiters.

*4 The Republic of South Africa follows far behind the Kingdom of Lesotho.

*5 For the NPA, the criteria are fear, favour and prejudice, more specifically, absence thereof.