All set for arms hearing, save for the paperwork
THE ARMS deal critic was there, the bidder who beat him to the contract was there, the retired admiral who ran the project was there… but the paperwork hadn’t been printed and sorted.
Dr Richard Young is an electronics engineer and the managing director and owner of CCII Systems, which lost out on contracts in the 1999 arms deal.
He appeared before the Arms Procurement Commission public hearings yesterday, but did not get further than being sworn in as commission lawyers explained that the paperwork for his statement wasn’t ready.
On Monday, Young sent the commission a 214-page statement plus enough attachments to fill seven lever-arch files. The papers are estimated to run to about 5 000 pages.
Last year, Young submitted a list of 1 061 documents to the commission that he intended to rely on in his evidence.
Commission evidence leader advocate Tshepo Sibeko SC said the electronic version of the statement had hypertext links to the documents, but that the links were not all correct and some documents were missing.
Legal teams also require copies of each witness’s statement and documents, but lawyers said they had received only one copy a team, which wasn’t sufficient.
Judge Willie Seriti postponed the hearing to this morning so that the documents could be sorted.
The commission had previously tried to arrange for Young to give evidence, but he did not appear for various reasons. Young has been a vociferous critic of the arms deal for many years.
Also at yesterday’s hearing was a legal team representing Thales Defence Systems, the company that, as ThomsonCSF and its subsidiary African Defence Systems, won the contract for the frigates’ combat suite. Young’s CCII lost out on that contract.
President Jacob Zuma’s former financial adviser, Schabir Shaik, had a share in African Defence Systems. Shaik was jailed briefly for corruption for payments to Zuma, and lost his business interests in asset forfeitures.
Also at the hearing, with the Department of Defence team, was naval warfare expert Rear-Admiral Jonny Kamerman, who was the project officer for the frigate acquisition. Kamerman and Young have clashed over the arms deal, and Kamerman’s presence at the hearing is understood to have led to a quick reshuffling yesterday of some of the documents Young planned to have used in the hearing.
The arms deal, signed in December 1999, bought four frigates, three submarines, 30 light helicopters, 28 Hawk fighter jets and 26 Gripen fighters. The eventual price was R46.666 billion, but the total cost (including of the bank loans) is expected to be R59.715bn, according to evidence from the National Treasury to the commission last year. The last payments are due to be made in 2018.
Treasury documents indicate that payments of about R3.5bn were made on the loans during the 2014/15 financial year.