Court implicated Deputy President

To French arms company Thomson he was the "rising man". Evidence - most of it a series of clandestinely scribbled notes by French arms executives - indicates that he was the politician to watch and preferably to woo.

The reason for this, Thomson-CSF executive Pierre Moynot would indicate later, was that this was the way they did business *1.

Arms contracts, he explained, were almost always awarded on the basis of a political decision, therefore access to the corridors of power was of the utmost importance.

At the end of the Shaik trial, Justice Hilary Squires would make three devastating findings about Jacob Zuma, indicating that what Moynot said was not only correct, but illegal as well.

Judge Squires found that Zuma was in a "generally corrupt" relationship with businessman Schabir Shaik - Thomson's South African contact.

He found that the documentation presented to the court to prove that the financial arrangement between Shaik and Zuma was above board was suspect and could not be relied on.

He found that Shaik brokered a bribe agreement on Zuma's behalf that would have extended this corrupt patronage to include Thomson-CSF. Also, he found that Zuma knew about the terms for this agreement and had consented to it, by using a "code" on which the parties had agreed.

The problem was that Judge Squires had made these findings - strongly implicating Zuma - in the context of convicting Shaik. The question was what burden of proof the president needed to axe his deputy.

It has, however, been three years during which Zuma has skirted the borders of the prosecution against his friend, Shaik.

He was first mentioned as "Mr X" when Shaik dragged the Scorpions to court over searches at his premises.

Mr X was mentioned as a party to the encrypted R500 000-a-year fax bribe agreement from Thomson. Mr X turned out to be Zuma himself.

Subsequently Zuma appeared in the shadows of the Hefer commission investigating allegations that the ANC had once suspected Bulelani Ngcuka of being an apartheid spy.

It was, however, Ngcuka who refused the Scorpions permission to raid Zuma's premises *2. It was also Ngcuka who made the decision that while there appeared to be a prima facie case of corruption against Zuma, only Shaik would be prosecuted.

Shaik was convicted of pursuing Zuma's influence. But as Judge Squires said, in more lofty legal terms, it takes two to tango *3.