De Lille Dossier set off a legal obstacle course

WHEN Cape Town mayor Patricia de Lille, then a PAC MP, stood up in parliament in September 1999 and claimed she had evidence of corruption in the government’s arms acquisition, she was booed and insulted.

She provided a 29-page document she claimed was compiled by concerned ANC members of parliament, and it became known as the De Lille Dossier.

The dossier served as a foundation for most of the allegations made in the R60-billion arms deal.

Instead of being hailed as a whistleblower and corruptionbuster, De Lille received death threats and was reportedly followed by intelligence operatives for more than two years.

She called for a commission of inquiry into the government’s arms procurement programme and handed her dossier to Judge Willem Heath, then head of the Special Investigating Unit, which had the legal power to cancel any government deal it found to be corrupt.

President Jacob Zuma was the deputy president when this drama unfolded in parliament in 1999.

The ball started to roll when the Office for Serious Economic Offences — later known as the Scorpions — confirmed in February 2000 that it was probing allegations of corruption in the arms deal.

It emerged years later that Zuma and Durban businessman Schabir Shaik met Alain Thetard, an executive of French arms company Thales, in Durban in March 2000 to arrange for a R500 000-a-year “bribe” for Zuma in return for him protecting Thales from any investigation. Details of this meeting were revealed in Schabir’s trial.

In October of the same year, Heath wrote to president Thabo Mbeki asking for permission to investigate the arms deal, but his request was turned down in January 2001.

One of the allegations in De Lille’s dossier was that one of the bidders, British Aerospace, “bought” then ANC chief whip Tony Yengeni a MercedesBenz.

The Sunday Times investigated the claim against Yengeni and established that he in fact received a 47% discount for his set of wheels, which he failed to declare in the members’ register in parliament, where MPs are expected to declare BIG NEWS: This is how the Sunday Times reported on the arms deal saga on September 28 2014 all gifts.

After the Sunday Times exposé was published in March 2001, Yengeni was arrested and later forced to resign from parliament.

He was sentenced to four years in jail.

In November 2001, Schabir was arrested and his brother Chippy, who worked for the Department of Defence, was suspended three days later.

Chippy was later found guilty by the department of leaking confidential arms deal documents. He resigned in March 2002.

Former National Prosecuting Authority boss Bulelani Ngcuka announced in August 2003 that it was going to prosecute Schabir, but not Zuma.

Ngcuka stressed at a press conference that the NPA had a “prima facie” case of corruption against Zuma but he was not confident of winning the case in court.

Judge Hilary Squires found Shaik guilty in June 2005 and sentenced him to 15 years in jail. Days later, Mbeki called a special sitting of parliament at which he announced his decision to fire Zuma from his government. He replaced him with Ngcuka’s wife, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.

Shortly after Zuma was axed, he was charged in connection with an allegedly corrupt relationship with Shaik.

His house in Forest Town, Johannesburg, was raided by the Scorpions in August 2005.

Zuma got a breather when, in 2009, former acting NPA boss Mokotedi Mpshe withdrew all corruption charges against him, citing interference in the manner in which the president had been charged.

The DA is appealing against Mpshe’s decision and the matter is still ongoing.

De Lille’s appeal for a commission of inquiry was revived when Cape Town-based arms deal activist Terry CrawfordBrowne asked the Constitutional Court in November 2010 to order Zuma, who became president in May 2009, to appoint a commission of inquiry.

After much pressure from Crawford-Browne, Zuma appointed the Seriti commission in September 2011.

The commission released its findings in April last year in which it recorded that it could not find “an iota” of evidence of corruption in the arms deal.

The findings are being challenged in the high court by Corruption Watch and the Right2Know Campaign.