Democratic Alliance press statement by
David Maynier MP
DA Shadow Minister of Defence and Military Veterans

12 February 2014
Release: immediate

 
The Minister of Trade and Industry, Rob Davies, has finally tabled a copy of a devastating internal audit report on the arms deal offsets in Parliament. This follows a four-month political battle to crowbar the report out of the Department of Trade and Industry.
 
The final report, entitled Strategic Defence Packages Performance Review Report, together with a final audit report, entitled Final Internal Audit Report: NIPP Performance Review: Strategic Defence Package, makes devastating findings about the arms deal offsets.
 
The internal audit, which audited 40 of 121 arms deal offset projects found inter alia that:

• Some companies obtained more credits compared to the investments and sales created or caused by them;

• Whether economic growth, access to new markets, establishing new trading partners and technology transfers took place as a result of the arms deal offsets, could not be determined;

• The total number of jobs which were created, and whether the jobs were sustained or not sustained, could not be verified; and

• Documents were missing from the project files held by the Department of Trade and Industry.

The findings of the internal audit report are particularly devastating when it comes to job creation. One of the primary justifications for the arms deal was that it would create jobs. However, the internal audit finds:

• Some arms deal offset projects did not include an obligation to deliver on job creation;

• The actual contribution of some arms deal offset projects were not described in terms of sustaining existing jobs or creating new jobs;

• Baseline employment figures were not provided at the beginning of some arms deal offset projects so as to be able to determine whether additional jobs were created; and

• Evidence of jobs created, in some arms deal offset projects, was simply not collected.

In fact, of the 40 business plans audited, only 24 business plans included estimates of the number of jobs to be created.
 
I will, therefore, be requesting the Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry, Joanne Fubbs, to schedule a hearing on the findings of the internal audit report on arms deal offsets.

Media enquiries:
 
David Maynier MP
DA Shadow Minister of Defence & Military Veterans
071 534 6398
 
Colin Wardle
Research and Communications Officer
073 326 0834

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And there, sportlovers, we have the myth of NIP in the SDPs.

And actually things are probably far worse in reality that are recorded by this internal report..

A while back a senior investigator told me that of the something like 60 SDP NIP business plans that he reviewed, 59 were clearly a crock of shit.

And I don't think that DIP was much better.

It is also a farce that the Corvette combat suite was scored as for fulfilling the 60% DIP requirement.

That is because that it is essentially a really existed in the country as a local development effort and therefore should fail the test of causality.

As usual due to top cover of chippy Shaik and Joe Modise above him, Thomson-CSF literally got away with economic murder on the Corvette combat suite. That DIP sweet is in addition to the price sweet of something like R700 million for delivering about half the originally specified and stipulated equipment.

15 years later I still get a lump in my throat, tears in my eyes and a thrombosis in my gonads when I think about and read about these things.

20 years incarceration for all the natural persons and 20 years on the Treasury blacklist for all the juristic persons is the very least that is required.