While Tony Yengeni and his ANC comrades, friends and relatives will today slaughter a cow to celebrate the end of his 20-week incarceration for defrauding parliament, opposition parties have called his controversial early release on parole "totally unacceptable", "a farce" and "a severe blow to the fight against corruption".

According to the Department of Correctional Services, Yengeni will be under correctional supervision until January 2008.

In 2003, Yengeni was found guilty of failing to declare a 47% discount on a luxury 4x4 from DaimlerChrysler, which was a party in the controversial multibillion rand arms deal. Yengeni was then chairman of parliament's defence portfolio committee.

Last year, the embattled politician lost an appeal against his four-year sentence and was sent to Pollsmoor Prison in August. A string of allegations of preferential treatment started when he was transferred to a hospital cell in the more comfortable Malmesbury Prison a day later.

Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille, who blew the whistle on corruption in the arms deal, yesterday said Yengeni's release on correctional supervision after only five months was "totally unacceptable".

"I think it sends out completely the wrong message. The message his prosecution sent was that the judicial system was independent and that politicians could be prosecuted no matter how good their political connections.

"The purpose of Yengeni's prison sentence was rehabilitation, but I don't think that could have been achieved after serving only five months of a four-year sentence."

DA correctional services spokes-man James Selfe said in a statement he had asked that Malmesbury correctional services area commissioner Sipho Manqele be hauled before parliament's correctional services portfolio committee to explain alleged preferential treatment of Yengeni.

This includes an alleged Christmas party with special food, attended by 17 ANC comrades and organised by his wife Lumka, while other inmates had to be content with prison food.

SA Prisoner's Organisation for Human Rights chairman Golden Miles Bhudu said the affair had left prisoners and others within the criminal justice system "totally confused as to why different sets of rules apply to people like Yengeni".

With acknowledgement Karen Breytenbach, Sapa and Cape Times.