Arms deal report classified: ex-minister
JOHANNESBURG: The former minister has seen the report and the arms deal critics have got a copy, but it’s still classified, so how may it be used in a public hearing?
That’s the question facing the Arms Procurement Commission today at the Pretoria hearings.
Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), acting for deal critics Andrew Feinstein, Paul Holden and Hennie van Vuuren, want to cross-examine former cabinet minister Alec Erwin about the Affordability Report on the arms deal which was tabled to the cabinet in 1999.
But as Erwin reminded the commission yesterday, the report is still classified.
Holden and Van Vuuren have previously extensively referred to the report in a book on the arms deal, and LHR told the commission they had a copy which they could use for cross-examination although the report is not before the public hearings.
“I am concerned about the fact that your clients are in possession of documents which have not been declassified,” said Judge Willie Seriti, who chairs the commission.
LHR also asked for copies of the arms deal contracts on the offsets, or relevant sections of them, as these contracts are also still classified. This relates to whether the Department of Trade and Industry should have allowed the use of “multipliers” to make it easier for arms deal contractors to get credits on offset projects.
Judge Seriti told LHR to discuss the classified documents with the other legal teams to come to an arrangement on cross-examination.
Yesterday, Erwin appeared before the commission, the first political head to do so.
As the former minister of trade and industry, Erwin was part of the cabinet sub-committee that oversaw the 1999 arms deal negotiations and contracts.
Erwin told the commission he had authorised the interpre- tation of the arms deal contractors’ offset obligations in terms of his department’s overall policy; this allowed the use of “multipliers” which made it easier for arms deal contractors – the obligors – to reach the contracted offset targets.
This is in line with what Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) officials have told the commission.
“In essence, the policy choice we made was to allow the obligors to reach the credit envelope without depending solely on investment, exports and local sales,” said Erwin. The credit envelope was the total that the contractors had to deliver on; the contracts were supposed to log credits only on investments, exports and local sales.
“This in all likelihood did make it easier for the obligors to reach the target but it did not reduce the target; it only altered their means of achieving it,” said Erwin.
“From the point of view of DTI it allowed us to try and achieve the full range of our industrial policy objectives, to which we gave a higher priority.”
Those wider DTI objectives included job creation and getting investment into neglected areas.
Erwin said he had always acted within his competency as minister and the policy wasn’t perfect but made positive achievements.
“In our view, the means used to attain those objectives was legitimate,” he said.
Erwin said it had been a difficult time after the ending of sanctions when markets had been closed to South Africa, and the new government was trying to attract investment. He said the danger of demanding too much from the contractors was that the cost would then be loaded onto the contracts in other ways.