It was all the way back in August 2003 when South Africa’s first national director of public prosecutions, Bulelani Ngcuka, announced that Schabir Shaik, the one-time financial adviser to Jacob Zuma, would be prosecuted for corruption.
“To any objective and truly unbiased mind, the prejudice and injustice visited on Zuma is self-evident. The facts and history of the Zuma prosecution … reveal a pattern of unlawful conduct that should attract the severest reprimand by our courts,” says his counsel, Muzi Sikhakhane SC, in his heads of argument.
But Zuma’s team argues that there was so much political and improper external interference that he will not get a fair trial. They refer to the so-called spy tapes. These are recordings of phone conversations between Ngcuka, after he resigned as prosecutions head, and former Scorpions head Leonard McCarthy about when to time the service of Zuma’s indictment — before or after the ANC’s 2007 Polokwane elective congress — in order to influence its outcome.
But Trengove says Downer has explained that, while he and Ngcuka disagreed, it was “a good-faith difference of opinion between two lawyers on their assessment of the strength of their case”.
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Source: SABC News Online - 🏆 32. / 51 Read more »