Publication: The Star Issued: Date: 2007-11-09 Reporter: Karyn Maughan Reporter:

Zuma May Face More Charges

 

Publication 

The Star
Date

2007-11-09
Reporter Karyn Maughan

Web Link

www.thestar.co.za

  

Corruption .Fraud and now ... Tax evasion. Money-laundering

The state's legal victories over Jacob Zuma and French arms company Thint will allow it to use thousands of documents as evidence against the ANC deputy president and add to any charges he may face.

These potential charges include money-laundering and tax evasion, and counts related to Zuma's acceptance of about R3,5-million in payments from his former financial adviser Schabir Shaik, many of which were made after Shaik was charged with fraud and corruption.

During the National Prosecuting Authority's failed bid to persuade Pietermaritzburg High Court Judge Herbert Msimang not to strike Zuma's case from the roll, it emerged that the state had used 93 000 disputed documents to compile a forensic audit into Zuma's financial affairs.

The documents had been seized during the Scorpions' August 2005 raids on offices and homes belonging to Zuma and his current and former attorneys, and included two boxes of documents handed by Shaik to Zuma's lawyer, Michael Hulley.

The KPMG audit, which sparked Judge Msimang's ire because of the state's seeming "presumption" in conducting it, is expected to form the basis of any new charge sheet the state will produce against Zuma and Thint.

Following Shaik's 2005 conviction, Zuma was charged with so-called "mirror images" of the counts for which his adviser had been found guilty.

The most crucial of these involved Zuma's alleged acceptance of a R500 000 bribe proposal which Shaik was found to have solicited from Thint in exchange for Zuma's protection from a potentially damaging arms deal inquiry.

The bribe was noted in Thint representative Alain Thetard's diary *1, which is one of the 14 documents that the state will be allowed to request from Mauritian authorities.

Zuma and his current and former attorneys, Hulley and Julekha Mohamed, were yesterday thwarted in their efforts to have evidence gathered during the Scorpions' August 2005 raids returned to them despite earlier winning their High Court applications to do so.

Zuma and Thint also failed to convince the Appeal Court's five judges that the NPA should not be allowed to request the originals of 14 documents, used to convict Shaik of fraud and corruption, from Mauritian authorities.

Not all of the state's victories were without controversy, with two of the appeal court's most senior judges finding that the Scorpions' raids on Zuma and Hulley were conducted with defective warrants.

Judge Ian Farlam, backed by Judge Tom Cloete, agreed with Durban High Court Judge Noel Hurt that the disputed warrants which authorised 250 Scorpions members to collect about 93 000 documents from Zuma and Thint premises around the country were "inappropriately vague".

Judge Farlam was, however, reluctant to order that the documents used to compile a massive forensic audit of Zuma's financial affairs should be handed back to Zuma and his attorneys, instead recommending that they be held in the custody of a High Court registrar until such time that the state decided to recharge Zuma.

Spurred on by the ruling of judges Farlam and Cloete, Hulley confirmed that he and Zuma's advocate, Kemp J Kemp SC, would meet today to prepare a leave to appeal application to the Constitutional Court, which they have to file within 15 days.

They will have to challenge the majority ruling given by judges Robert Nugent, Nathan Ponnan and Dunstan Mlambo, in which they disagreed with judges Farlam and Cloete and found that Judge Hurt's reasoning reflected an approach that was "fundamentally unsound".

Judge Nugent found that the Scorpions had a statutory authority to investigate suspected criminal activity and were therefore given "wide powers of search and seizure" that enabled their officers to conduct searches without specifying exactly what they were looking for *2.

While four agreed, for different reasons, that the documents should be preserved, Judge Ponnan found that the state's conduct in the raid on Mohamed amounted to nothing less than a naked invasion *3 of her privacy of her home and office without the requisite justification.

"She thus has a right grounded in the constitution to the return of the documents unlawfully seized from her," he found.

With acknowledgements to Karyn Maughan and The Star.


*1       Was it? This is news to me.


*2      It makes sense. A search warrant is not an Anton Piller order?


*3      This is nonsense.

These days with the principle of client-attorney privilege, criminals simply get their attorneys to keep incriminating records.

Therefore client-attorney privilege cannot simply cover every single record in an attorney's possession or safekeeping.

Only items relating directly to bone fide client-attorney privilege, such as outline and details of defence strategy, legal advice, etc. should be subject to such privilege.

Indeed in this specific case, Juleka Mohamed is not and never was even Zuma's official attorney.

She is someone with a Cuban legal qualification.