Franny Rabkin And Ernest Mabuza
13 May 2008
Johannesburg — KWAZULU-Natal Judge President Vuka Tshabalala has taken the province's deputy director of public prosecutions to task for setting down for trial the corruption case against African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma without consulting him or the other parties to the case.
In a letter to prosecutor Anton Steynberg last week , Tshabalala said: "While you allege that the matter was set down for August 4 2008, no arrangement was made with me and I have not had any contact with your office in this regard."
Tshabalala also said it was clear that "the date which you allocated was not by agreement with the other parties to the litigation".
The parties will meet Tshabalala on Thursday to agree on another date.
After Zuma's corruption trial was struck off the roll in September 2006, the prosecuting authority indicated it would put the case back on the roll.
A case may, in terms of the Criminal Procedure Act, be struck off the roll for unreasonable delays by the state. However, the state is then entitled to reinsert the matter back onto the roll. The prosecution did this on December 28 last year, when a summons and an indictment were served on Zuma. The warrant said that the trial date was between August 4 and 12.
Mike Hellens, a senior counsel at the Johannesburg Bar, said that in practice , court dates for criminal trials in the high court were determined by the prosecutors. The procedure is that the deputy judge president, in consultation with the judge president, will make a number of judges available for criminal trials in a given court term.
The prosecuting authority will name one of the prosecutors as "roll-planner", who will then decide, based on the number of available judges , when to fit in all the trials and before which judges.
But even in run-of-the-mill cases, Hellens said, any accused person may go to court on the day set down for his trial and argue that he is not ready to go to trial.
This is because "courts are very aware that an accused person is entitled to a fair trial". If it is reasonable to delay the trial for the accused, a court will normally do so.
However, Hellens said the judge president may, at any time, intervene. Tshabalala said that "in a case like this", the NPA should have consulted his office.
French arms company Thint, which is charged together with Zuma and would answer to the counts of racketeering and corruption, wrote a letter to Steynberg on Sunday and said there had been no agreement on the proposed trial date and that their lawyers were not ready for trial on August 4.
This was because they were occupied with a case before the Mauritius Supreme Court, and had been busy with Constitutional Court challenge against the search and seizure warrants delivered on Zuma.
Thint's lawyers were also of the view that the Constitutional Court judgment on the constitutionality of the warrants used to search the offices of Thint was imminently relevant. The matter was heard in March and the court reserved judgment.
It appears that Thint's lawyers are pinning their hopes on the Constitutional Court finding that the warrants were unconstitutional and therefore would be inadmissible in the criminal trial.
If the court ruled in favour of Zuma and Thint, the state would have to amend its indictment drastically in order to remove any documents obtained from the warrants. The state would need time to amend the indictments.
"Any decision taken prior to that judgment will be premature," Thint's lawyer, Ajay Sooklal, argued in the letter.
Sooklal said it was not sure whether it was appropriate to consider some of the contents of the report considering the challenge to the searches and the state's possession of some of the documents that were still in dispute.
Jacob Zuma's prosecution timeline
The court also dismisses Zuma's appeal against a letter of request granted by the Dur ban High Court to Mauritian authorities. The prosecution wants the Mauritian officials to re lease originals of 14 documents, including the diary of former French arms official Alain Thetard, in which an alleged entry indicated he had a meeting with Zuma and Shaik in 2000, where a R500000 bribe for Zuma was dis cussed.
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