Ex-president misses his own deadline

FORMER president Jacob Zuma has missed his own deadline to challenge the decision that he will face prosecution on corruption charges relating to the arms deal – and questions over who is paying his legal bills may be the reason.

Zuma’s as yet unexplained failure to meet yesterday’s deadline comes as the EFF turns up the heat on his lawyers – by demanding that attorney Michael Hulley be ordered to pay back millions in taxpayers’ money already spent on Zuma’s legal fees.

EFF leader Julius Malema said the party was challenging a decision by the state attorney “to pay unlimited amounts of public money to a private attorneys’ firm to perform and procure legal and related services for a politician facing corruption and other charges”.

“It has emerged that payments in excess of R32-million have been made so far‚ and more payments are expected to be made in the future‚” he said‚ later stating that these payments were clearly unlawful.

Malema said it was apparent that the charges Zuma stood accused of had nothing to do with his official functions – so he was not entitled to state funding of his defence.

He also argued that Zuma’s multimillion-rand legal funding violated the principle of equality before the law‚ as ordinary people facing prosecution would never have been able to spend 12 years fighting the state with unlimited taxpayers’ money.

The National Prosecuting Authority has confirmed that Zuma’s lawyers did not meet their own deadline to file a review of National Director of Public Prosecutions Shaun Abrahams’s decision to pursue the corruption case against the former president.

Zuma’s legal team indicated that it would challenge Abrahams’s decision on the basis that it was irrational and unlawful. But‚ at the close of business on Tuesday‚ they had not done so.

The DA has already launched a review of the 2006 decision to fund Zuma’s defence against the corruption case. – TimesLIVE