Investigation into Teta almost complete

Fidentia CE J Arthur Brown was on Thursday late for a scheduled appearance in the Cape Town Magistrate's Court, on charges that include fraud involving the Transport, Education and Training Authority (Teta). In the dock without him were co-accused Dr Piet Bothma, Teta's CE, and a newcomer, Jacobus Theart, who is cited in the charge sheet as accused number three.

Scorpions prosecutor Bruce Morrison SC, assisted by Tersia du Toit, told the court they had called the case earlier than expected, and that Brown was not at fault for his absence. He and Du Toit had tried without success to telephone Brown to get him to court sooner, they said. The case was postponed to July 29 in Brown's absence.

Morrison said the investigation was almost completed and that there were "just a few more things to be done". He said he envisaged an additional charge to the current charges of fraud, corruption, money laundering, reckless trading and a contravention of the Financial Intelligent Centre Act.

The fraud charge relating to Teta involves over R2m. Theart faces charges of theft involving R800,000 and money laundering. However, Morrison did not indicate to the court how Theart fitted into the picture. He said both the Cape Town and Randburg Courts had jurisdiction to deal with the case, and he would launch an application to centralize the charges -- so they could all be dealt with together in Cape Town.

In the Teta case, the trio are expected to eventually go on trial in the Cape High Court. Later, Brown alone stood in the dock of the Cape Town Regional Court, where he is to go on trial on September 15 on two charges of fraud, one of theft and one of violating the Companies Act.

These charges relate to his involvement with Fidentia. In these proceedings, Du Toit told magistrate Wilma van der Merwe that she had furnished defence attorney Asghar Mia with further particulars to the charges. At her request the case was postponed to May 30.

Source: Moneyweb

An executive-minded decision

The issue of land claims and homelessness continues to be one of the most pressing of our social problems. Unsurprisingly, the courts have been drawn into the intricacies of this problem, particularly when it comes to squatters and their removal.

Recently, in the Johannesburg City case, the Constitutional Court sought to guide authorities confronted with the dilemma of the removal of a large group of people who reside in unsafe buildings but who have nowhere else to live. The court's judgement ruled that the relevant authority engaged with the affected dwellers before eviction could take place: "Engagement is a two-way process in which the city and those about to become homeless would talk to each other meaningfully in order to achieve certain objectives." This follows earlier qualifications to the previously absolute right of an authority or land owner to evict persons, but its full implications do not appear to have reached Cape Town.

On March 10, the Cape High Court ordered the eviction of about 20 000 residents from the Joe Slovo settlement. The residents argued that the parties that sought their removal -- a company charged with the task of transforming the settlement into formal housing and the provincial and national ministries -- had no legal standing to bring an application for eviction. They also argued they had a expectation that 70% of the opportunities afforded by the new housing at Joe Slovo would be awarded to their community.

The decision on the argument regarding legitimate expectations is illuminating. Their claim on 70% of Joe Slovo was not denied by the applicants for their eviction. The court accepted this and the entitlement would act as a defence against eviction. But the court also found that the initial occupation was unlawful, which can never give rise to a legitimate expectation, so the residents could not rely in law upon the undertaking that had been given to them.

This is surely a controversial judgment. It cites but one decision as authority for this finding. Although there is no unanimity on the point, there is alternative authority that supports the argument that there is a substantive legitimate expectation, where such an undertaking is given, except if the undertaking is made in violation of a statute or when it is not in the public interest. Neither was the case in this dispute; hence there appears to be a significant injustice if people were removed from land where clear promises had been made to them.

But more problematic is the absence of any engagement as set out by the Constitutional Court. Though the Cape High Court found compliance with the Johannesburg City case, the residents asserted that no meaningful consultation had taken place. The applicants conceded that consultation had been limited. No evidence of such engagement was shown.

A unilateral decision was made to move the residents more then 37km, far from where their children went to school and where many were employed.

Of course a court must seek to balance the state's attempt to give effect to its constitutional obligation to provide housing with the rights of those who are homeless but whose actions may frustrate the housing programme. That will often prove to be a difficult balancing exercise, hence some sympathy for the judicial dilemma. But in this case the court manifestly glossed over the undertaking given to the residents and the legal implications of meaningful engagement before any removal could take place. It is this deference to developers and the diminution of the importance of consultation that makes this judgement so problematic.

This case must raise a debate about the meaning of legal transformation.

Zimbabwe Arms Shipped by China Spark an Uproar

A Chinese ship loaded with armaments for Zimbabwe steamed into the port of Durban this week (19 April 2008) and set off a political firefight, putting newfound pressure on South Africa — and now China — to reduce support for Zimbabwe’s government as it cracks down on its rivals after a disputed election.

Dock workers at the Durban port, backed by South Africa’s powerful unions, refused to unload the ammunition and weapons on Friday, vowing protests and threatening violence if the government tried to do it without them.

Source: New York Times

UN Rights Council to Review South Africa

South Africa’s human rights record will be scrutinized on April 15, 2008 by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva at a Universal Periodic Review Session that is likely to focus on abuses around HIV infections, sexual violence, and asylum procedures.

Under the review process, governments submit a written report and nongovernmental organizations are invited to comment on the human rights situation. But since South Africa did not submit its report until the eve of the session, and did not consult ahead of the session with South African civil society groups and international nongovernmental organizations, these groups were only able to present written concerns about a wide range of human rights issues to the council.

Among the topics of concern to Human Rights Watch are:

* The high incidence of sexual violence and the scale of HIV infection in South Africa. It is essential that health provision reform due in May 2008 ensure that all victims of sexual violence have prompt access to and information about post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) to reduce the chance of contracting HIV.
* The 2007 Sexual Offences Act, which requires victims to either file criminal charges with the South African Police or report the alleged offence to a designated health establishment as a condition of receiving PEP. Human Rights Watch and other organizations have found that conditioning assistance on filing a police report may effectively prevent victims from receiving lifesaving PEP because many survivors are reluctant to file charges or because of police delays.
* Asylum procedures, which can be onerous. Asylum-seekers often face obstacles in filing asylum applications. With the deteriorating situation in Zimbabwe, urgent reform is needed to ensure protection for Zimbabweans seeking refuge in South Africa.

Zuma on crime: Shabangu has a point

Deputy Safety and Security Minister Susan Shabangu's controversial "shoot to kill" comment has received African National Congress (ANC) president Jacob Zuma's backing.

Speaking at the KwaZulu-Natal Institute of Local Government and Traditional Leadership's fund-raising gala dinner on Friday night, Zuma said: "If you have a deputy minister saying the kind of things that the deputy minister was saying, this is what we need to happen." Zuma pointed out that police had at one stage been "asked not to shoot at criminals". "Because the fact of the matter [is that] criminals shoot police. Instead of talking at that level, we ought to be seeing action that we are tougher on the criminals. That's the point I'm making. What the deputy minister was saying is what we are to be doing is dealing with the criminals rather than talking about it."

Shabangu, who was speaking at an anti-crime imbizo (meeting) in Pretoria West, was quoted by the Pretoria News as saying: ""You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility. Your responsibility is to serve and protect." While her comments have sparked outrage among some and received the backing of others, the issue of crime has been raised repeatedly at several functions attended by the ANC president in Durban and Richards Bay during the past two days. "You know, if you haven't experienced crime, you can theorise about it, but for those that have experienced it, it is a painful thing," Zuma said. He said he had visited the Cape Flats and heard several horrendous crime stories. He added that many of those who felt strongly about crime had been victims themselves. Addressing the media, he said: "I'm hoping that when you write, [you] don't sensationalise what I said. Use the words that say exactly what I say. I just hope the clarity is as clear as I put it."

Earlier on Friday, Zuma had said that the issue of bail for those accused of rape and murder needed to be debated. "I don't think we have debated the issue. Let us do something that favours the victim and not the criminal." Asked if he was personally in favour of rape and murder accused being denied bail, Zuma said: "I'm not saying it's my personal view. I want to say that these things need to be looked at." Zuma cited a number of examples where members of the public had questioned him about criminals being released on bail. "I have not been able to give them answers. We over-stretch human rights sometimes," he said. He pointed out that once a murder had taken place, a person's right to life had already been infringed. "We need to look at the things we do that don't favour the victim." He also said it was an "open secret" that murderers released on bail often interfered with witnesses.

At the dinner, Zuma said he believed that education could play a major role in combating crime. If the country could tackle crime, health and education, many of its problems would be resolved. He suggested that remuneration in these three sectors needed to be addressed. "I don't think we should be afraid to pay for those services," he said.

Source: Mail & Guardian

Kill the criminals, minister tells cops

Deputy Minister of Safety and Security Susan Shabangu told police that they should kill criminals if they threaten police or the community, the Star reported on Thursday. "You must kill the bastards if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations. That is my responsibility. Your responsibility is to serve and protect," Shabangu said at an anti-crime imbizo in Pretoria West on Wednesday.

Shabangu, who received a standing ovation, was responding to questions on what police and the government are doing to curb crime. Residents of Danville, Pretoria West, Lotus Gardens, Hercules and Elandspoort complained about the "pathetic excuses" given by police allegedly unable or unwilling to deal with crime. "I want to assure the police station commissioners and policemen and women from these areas that they have permission to kill these criminals. "I won't tolerate any pathetic excuses for you not being able to deal with crime. You have been given guns, now use them." She added that there should be no warning shots. "I want no warning shots. You have one shot and it must be a kill shot. If you miss, the criminals will go for the kill. They don't miss. We can't take this chance. "Criminals are hell-bent on undermining the law and they must now be dealt with. If criminals dare to threaten the police or the livelihood or lives of innocent men, women and children, they must be killed. End of story. There are to be no negotiations with criminals."

She said law-abiding people and not the criminals must be protected. "I say that criminals must be made to pay for their crimes. The Constitution says criminals must be kept safe, but I say No!" she said.

Source: Mail & Guardian

McCarthy resignation a mystery

The Presidency and Justice Ministry on Friday claimed to have no knowledge of Scorpions boss Leonard McCarthy's attempts to resign.

They also claimed to knowing nothing about President Thabo Mbeki's reported refusal to accept the resignation letter. "There's no such thing," said presidential spokesperson Mukoni Ratshitanga. "Leonard McCarthy accounts to the minister of justice. The Department of Justice will deal with this matter."

Spokesperson for Justice Minister Brigitte Mabandla, Zolile Nqayi said he knew neither of a reported meeting between McCarthy and the Justice Ministry, nor of the resignation itself.

The Cape Times reported on Friday that Mbeki was apparently refusing to accept McCarthy's resignation letter, which was submitted this week. According to the article, the newspaper had "reliably learnt" that McCarthy met Deputy Justice Minister Johnny de Lange on Thursday to discuss the issue. The government, the National Prosecuting Authority and legal sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the meeting, as well as Mbeki's apparent reluctance to accept the resignation, the Cape Times reported.

Source: News 24

FBI nabs Fidentia fugitive

One of the alleged masterminds in the Fidentia scandal was arrested by the FBI in the United States, the National Prosecuting Authority said on Tuesday. Spokesperson Tlali Tlali said Steven William Goodwin was arrested following a request by the Directorate of Special Operations, better known as the Scorpions.

According to the NPA, Goodwin was detained on Saturday at Los Angeles airport by US authorities and the Customs and Immigration Department. "Their intervention followed an alert issued by Interpol that Goodwin was en route to the US and that a warrant for his arrest had been issued in South Africa in July 2007. "Goodwin left South Africa for Australia in early February 2007, following the appointment of a curator to manage the Fidentia group of companies and before the Scorpions investigation was authorised in February 2007," said Tlali.

Goodwin was described as the "real founder" of Fidentia and has been named repeatedly in a draft indictment against Fidentia boss J Arthur Brown. He left South Africa just days before Brown was arrested in March last year. The draft charge sheet says that at the time Goodwin owned and was MD of a company named Worthytrade 185. Acting as a broker, he initiated the contact that resulted in the Transport Education Training Authority (Teta) entrusting promissory notes worth R100,3-million to Maddock Incorporated in April 2003.

The NPA has 60 days within which to apply for Goodwin's extradition and is preparing papers to launch such an application, said Tlali. "The Scorpions are currently working with the US Department of Justice to ensure the matter is resolved speedily and successfully. Once on South African soil, Goodwin will face charges of theft, fraud and corruption running into millions," he said. The charge sheet says Brown acted "in the execution of a common purpose" with Goodwin in providing a R6-million bribe to ensure that the Teta board made the investment with FAM. Goodwin is also named repeatedly in the section of the charge sheet that deals with money laundering.

Brown will go on trial in September on fraud and theft charges. He is out on R1-million bail.

The financial director of Fidentia, Graham Maddock, was effectively jailed for seven years on 54 counts involving fraud, theft, money laundering, contraventions of the Financial Intelligence Centre Act and the reckless or fraudulent conduct of business.

Source: Mail & Guardian

The Prince of Mines

Patrice Motsepe entered the mining business when South Africa ended apartheid. Today the onetime lawyer and avowed capitalist is the country's first black billionaire.

On a brilliantly sunny Thursday in January, Patrice Motsepe, a vigorous 46-year-old with regal posture, is striding through a gleaming shopping mall on the Cape Town waterfront. Suddenly a crowd forms. A half-dozen employees from the Build-A-Bear Workshop ask for his autograph. Two giggling young women roll up their sleeves as Motsepe signs their arms with a black marker, smiling while admirers snap photos with cell phones. An older woman approaches Motsepe and nearly swoons, grasping his arm and laying her head on his chest as he pats her back and murmurs thank you in Xhosa, one of the six African languages he speaks.

All this is not for a movie star or entertainer but for South Africa's first black billionaire. Over 15 years Motsepe, preaching free market capitalism, turned a low-level mining services business into the country's first black-owned mining company, African Rainbow Minerals, with 2007 revenue of $875 million. Driven by the Asian commodities boom, ARM's share price has rocketed in the past year from $12 to $24, pushing the value of Motsepe's net worth to $2.4 billion. Motsepe, a lawyer by training, serves as ARM's executive chairman, with a 42% stake in the company. He also owns a 5.5% stake worth $295 million in Sanlam, a publicly traded financial services company outside Cape Town.

By billionaire standards Motsepe has a modest lifestyle. His three sons attend prestigious private schools, but he has only one home, in the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Bryanston, and no yacht or plane. His one indulgence is to own the Mamelodi Sundowns, a soccer team. It doesn't tarnish his star quality that he's married to one of South Africa's most glamorous women, a medical doctor turned fashion impresario.

But for all the adulation, in South Africa such success comes with a price: being labeled an oligarch. Even many blacks have complained that the country's 1994 transformation from apartheid to democracy has benefited only the elite few. The criticism stems from laws that require substantial black ownership in certain industries, including mining. A handful of politically connected individuals have grown enormously wealthy as a result. One of Motsepe's sisters, Bridgette Radebe, who's married to transport minister Jeffrey Radebe, heads a mining company and is said to be among the wealthiest black women in the country. "It's called crony capitalism," says Moeletsi Mbeki, 62, brother of South Africa's president and an outspoken critic of the race-preference laws. "It's an anticompetitive system."

Motsepe concedes he benefited from the system yet says that his success was no handout, as he began building his mining business before the laws started taking effect in 2005. He says, "The legislation came way after we did our deals."

Motsepe and his family were in a better position than most to take advantage of the end of apartheid. Born in the sprawling black township of Soweto (next to Johannesburg), where his mother had grown up, Motsepe is a member of a royal clan within the Tswana tribe. He is, in fact, a prince.

Motsepe's father, Augustine Motsepe, was a critic of the apartheid regime. Before his son Patrice was born, Augustine was banished by the government to Hammanskraal, a rural area north of Pretoria where the government thought he could do less damage (he named his son after Patrice Lumumba, head of the Republic of the Congo and one of the first black African postcolonial leaders). There he opened a grocery store and then a beer hall and restaurant. "People don't know that there were very successful black businessmen in the years of apartheid," says Motsepe.

Though one of Patrice's maternal great-grandfathers came from Scotland, the old government classified the Motsepes as African. The family had to pull strings to get their seven children admitted to an Afrikaans-language Catholic boarding school that was officially designated for so-called "coloreds," South Africans of mixed race. From age 6, Motsepe spent school holidays working behind the counter in his father's store, where he says he learned his earliest lessons about business. "Whenever my father made a profit, he always plowed it back into the store," Motsepe recalls.

He graduated from the University of Swaziland and then became one of the few black law graduates of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, designated whites-only by the apartheid government (Motsepe had to apply for an exemption to attend). In 1988 he joined Bowman Gilfillan, one of South Africa's largest corporate law firms, and in 1993 he became the firm's first black partner. Energetic and affable, Motsepe never wore his race on his sleeve, says Bowman partner and longtime Motsepe lawyer and confidant Neil Rissik.

Indeed, ask Motsepe about what it was like to grow up as a black man under the violent, racist apartheid regime and he responds with bromides. "The apartheid system was very bad for our people, very bad," he says blandly, switching quickly to the positive. "Only in South Africa could you have a change in government without civil war. If there wasn't the depth of love and caring among our people, this would not have happened."

Source: Forbes Magazine

'If you show that you support MDC, you will starve'

Credible elections in Zimbabwe were among the main objectives of the talks between the Zimbabwean government and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) last year. But despite new regulations, Zimbabwe's polls are unlikely to be free or fair.

President Robert Mugabe's government would like the world to believe otherwise, arguing that political space has been opened up for the opposition to campaign. Neighbouring states should look beyond the rhetoric as, sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.

For weeks now, I've been travelling through Zimbabwe's 10 provinces. Ordinary voters around the country described to me how supporters of the ruling party have physically attacked and intimidated people perceived to support the opposition.

Food has become a political weapon. In nearly all the provinces I visited, Zimbabweans told me that only supporters of the ruling Zanu-PF receive state-subsidised grain or farming equipment. An elderly man from Marange in Manicaland province told me: "If you show yourself to support the opposition, you will starve."
In Mutare, even a Zanu-PF loyalist confirmed that the party manipulates the distribution of food according to political loyalty: "It is very easy. Only those who are on the councillors' lists can access the grain," she told me. "At our rallies, only known supporters of Zanu-PF are allowed to attend."

Despite improved electoral laws, across Zimbabwe I found a chaotic -- and easily abused -- voter registration process. The electoral commission is unprepared and partisan. The voting procedure will be new and more complex than before, but there has been minimal voter education around the country. The opposition's access to the broadcast media is restricted.

A local activist from Makonde constituency in Mashonaland West province told me about the intense intimidation of opposition supporters in his area. "The opposition MDC are visited daily by Zanu-PF youth who shout and sing outside their homes," he said. "They call them sell-outs and tell them they will deal with the MDC candidates after the elections."

In spite of the intimidation, violence has been less conspicuous than in previous elections - in part because of prohibitions in the reformed Electoral Act. But, given the widespread violence during elections in 2000 and 2002, mere threats or allusions to past acts are enough to scare people.

In Masvingo province, a primary-school teacher told me how ruling party youths attacked him after he urged people to register to vote.

"They hit me with clubs on my head," he told me. "They displayed me before the rest of the school and now they are keeping an eye on me." Terrible scars were still visible on his head a month after the attack.

The police claim they are taking a "zero tolerance" approach to violence ahead of the polls, although many members of the police were previously involved in attacks on the opposition, civil society activists and perceived opposition supporters. None of these incidents, documented by Human Rights Watch, have been investigated. The teacher in Masvingo reported the incident, but the perpetrators were never caught.

The onus for reporting violations now rests on regional observers, in particular the Southern African Development Community (SADC) observer mission. International and local observers who charged that previous elections in 2000 and 2002 were blatantly fraudulent were not invited to return for parliamentary elections in 2005, nor for the general elections.

Mugabe's government claims that the elections will conform to the SADC guidelines and principles governing democratic elections. South Africans and their SADC neighbours have a key role to play in the run-up to the elections. SADC should call on the Zimbabwean government to grant access to all election sites. To gauge compliance, observers need to judge the political context in which the elections are being held, not just the voting process itself.

Previous post-election assessments by SADC were alarmingly positive, despite widespread human rights abuses and irregularities in the last three polls. If South Africa and other SADC observers are serious about ending Zimbabwe's political crisis, then another round of flawed elections in Zimbabwe cannot be followed by a "business-as-usual" approach.

South Africans have already seen hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans vote with their feet by crossing the Limpopo to flee hunger, violence and persecution. Now is the time for SADC to help ordinary Zimbabweans to exercise their right to vote freely at home.

Source: Human Rights Watch

Shock testimony at Taylor trial

Charles Taylor celebrated his rise to power in Liberia with a ceremony involving a human sacrifice, burying a pregnant woman alive in sand, one of his former military commanders has testified.

The admission came during a trial at The Hague where the former president is accused of war crimes. During a day of grim testimony, Joseph "Zigzag" Marzah described the ceremony and acknowledged committing hundreds of other murders on Taylor's orders.
"We executed everybody - babies, women, old men. There were so many executions. I can't remember them all," Marzah told the court. Among the victims were Taylor's opponents and former allies who he thought had betrayed him, Marzah said. One was a guerrilla commander known as Superman, who Taylor ordered executed and his severed hand brought to him as proof of his death. The killers ceremonially ate Superman's heart, and afterwards were given $200 each which they were told came from Taylor for "cigarette money".

Taylor often leaned forward with a scowl on his face as he listened to Marzah's testimony for more than five hours. Asked under cross-examination if he had any "pangs of conscience", Marzah replied "yes", but said he had no difficulty carrying out his orders."I was a servant to my chief, Charles Taylor," he said. He was adamant that Taylor had specifically ordered him to chop off hands, and paid a monetary reward for the killing of babies. He recalled receiving an order from Taylor to cut open a woman close to giving birth because the unborn child "is an enemy". Under prompting from Courtenay Griffith, defence counsel, Marzah said: "It's not difficult to kill a baby. Sometimes you just knock them on the head, sometimes you throw them in a pit, sometimes you throw them in the river and they are dead. Then you give the report to Charles Taylor."

Prosecutors described Marzah as one of their key witnesses, testifying with inside knowledge of the former Liberian president's operations in Liberia and neighbouring Sierra Leone. In both countries he is accused of responsibility for the widespread murder, rape and amputations committed by soldiers loyal to him.

The first former African head of state to face an international tribunal, Taylor, 59, has pleaded not guilty to 11 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. He is being tried by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. His trial began last year but was halted for six months after a chaotic first day on which he fired his legal team. The case resumed in January, when prosecutors began to call the first of dozens of witnesses expected to testify.

Describing the ceremony on the beach behind White Flower, Taylor's executive mansion in Monrovia, Marzah said a woman was placed standing up in a pit between two oil drums, then covered over with sand. Then a white sheep was killed on the spot. "It was a sacrifice," Marzah said. Taylor "was the first person to put sand in his hand and put it in the hole". Marzah said the event happened in 1995, although Taylor did not come to power until he won an election in 1997. At other times, Marzah repeatedly became frustrated and angry when questioned too closely about the timing of events, saying he had been with Taylor "from beginning to end," and had done too much to recall the dates of each event.

Marzah said Taylor encouraged his fighters to "play with human blood" to create fear among his enemies. He described militia checkpoints meant to terrify the population. After setting up roadblocks, "we used human intestines. We put heads on sticks for people to be afraid. "When the person is executed, the stomach is split and you use the intestine as a rope".

Source: Al Jazeera

NPA: Parly 'incorrect' over Browse report

Parliament's joint standing committee on intelligence came to "incorrect conclusions" in its report on the so-called "Special Consolidated Report" produced by the Scorpions, the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) said on Wednesday.

Source: Mail and Guardian

Anger at Cape eviction order

The Cape High Court has given the go-ahead for the eviction of several thousand residents of the Joe Slovo informal settlement to make way for a housing development. The order, handed down by Judge President John Hlophe on Monday, followed an application by state-owned developer Thubelisha Homes, Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu and Western Cape minister of housing Richard Dyantyi. Hundreds of Joe Slovo residents, who had gathered in the street outside the court, chanted angry slogans after the judgment was handed down.

Anti-Eviction Campaign coordinator Mzonke Poni said: "We really do not welcome the judgement because we are saying there's no way a judge can issue an order to evict more than 20 000 people without considering the impact it will have on their livelihoods. The residents are being evicted to make way for the construction of the N2 Gateway housing project.

Source: Mail & Guardian

Cosatu axes Willie Madisha

The suspended head of South Africa's main union body, an ally of President Thabo Mbeki, has been expelled after a probe into the disappearance of a large cash donation, media reports said on Wednesday.

Willie Madisha's expulsion was decided at the central executive committee meeting of the labour federation, Cosatu, which considered a report on the missing money, public radio reported. The Sowetan and Business Day newspapers also said Madisha, a vocal backer of Mbeki, had been fired.

Source: News24

Don't sacrifice lives for profit, says Motsepe

No life could be "sacrificed" in the name of profits, mining magnate and businessman Patrice Motsepe told protesting workers at a ferromanganese smelter near Durban on Monday. Speaking to workers, who on Monday staged a protest at the Assmang smelter following Sunday's blast that claimed the lives of five people, Motsepe said: "There is no life that can be sacrificed in the name of profits or making money. I will not tolerate it."

Motsepe, who is the largest single shareholder in African Rainbow Minerals, which is a 50% shareholder in Assmang, said that the circumstances surrounding Sunday's accident appeared to be similar to an accident that happened at the smelter last year. Motsepe spoke to workers after meeting with the Assmang management as well as senior workers' representatives. The explosion and subsequent fire ripped through the number six furnace of the smelter shortly before 5am in Cato Ridge, about 60km from Durban. One person died at the scene while a further four died during the course of Sunday and Monday morning. After addressing the workers, Motsepe told journalist that he could not comment on the cause of the accident until the completion of investigations. "We are not representing shareholders' interests if there is no zero tolerance towards [poor] safety," he said. Following the blast, the smelter's six furnaces were shut down. Motsepe could not immediately say how much the shutdown was costing the company. However, even though the smelter had been shut down, the estimated 700 workers were still expected to report for work to ensure that they were paid.

KwaZulu-Natal provincial minister of social welfare Meshak Radebe and Durban mayor Obed Mlaba also briefly spoke to the protesting workers. Earlier in the day about 100 workers marched from the smelter to the Cato Ridge Country club with a coffin, which they then placed in the middle of a hall where a Labour Department inquiry into a manganese poisoning case at Assmang was being held. The inquiry had to be postponed and was resumed later in the afternoon when the workers returned to the smelter. The inquiry, headed by Vuli Sibisi, is investigating the alleged 40 cases of manganism caused by workers breathing in fumes with airborne manganese particles.

Manganism is acquired by over-exposure to airborne manganese and is a disease that affects the sufferer's central nervous system, leaving them with symptoms very similar to Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis. Assmang executive director, Brian Brookeman, was about to give testimony when the workers marched into the hall with their coffin. On Monday, the Labour Department announced that the company would be subject to a second inquiry that would investigate the cause of Sunday's explosion. Labour department spokesperson Zolisa Sigabi said "a full-scale government investigation is under way following yesterday's [Sunday] massive explosion. The inquiry aims at establishing the cause of the tragedy, including any possible negligence or flouting of occupational health and safety measures," she said. On Sunday she said: "Labour inspectors who immediately arrived at the scene have in a preliminary report indicated that it is suspected that a water leakage into furnace number six caused the explosion to occur."

Earlier, National Union of Metalworkers (Numsa) spokesperson Mziwakhe Hlangani said that the company's engineers had ordered that the furnace be shut down before the explosion "after it was detected to have a water leakage". "We do not know how and why it was operated by the night-shift staff operators, because it was declared unsafe to put it [the furnace] in operation and we believe drastic steps after thorough investigations should be taken," Numsa local organiser Siphiwe Ntsele said. He said it was the second blast in nearly three months. He claimed that a worker had died on December 14 2007, in a similar blast.

Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana on Monday condemned the blast and vowed to "pull all stops in getting someone to account for the deaths and injuries" in Sunday's incident.

Source: IoL

New evidence challenges official picture of Kennedy shooting

The official record states that senator Robert F Kennedy, like his brother before him, was killed by a crazed lone gunman. But the assassination of a man who seemed to embody so much hope for a bitterly divided country embroiled in an unpopular war still troubles this nation. Little about the official explanation of the events at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5 1968 makes sense. Now a new forensic analysis of the only audio recording of the fatal shots has given new weight to a controversial theory that there were in fact two shooters, and that the man convicted of Kennedy's killing — Sirhan Sirhan - did not fire the fatal shots.

Following his victory speech to supporters after clinching a tight democratic primary victory in California, Kennedy left the podium in the Embassy ballroom to address a press conference. But the shortcut he and his entourage took through the hotel's pantry quickly descended into bloody mayhem. As Kennedy turned from shaking hands with two of the kitchen staff, a gunman stepped forward and began firing. Kennedy was hit by four shots including one which lodged in the vertebrae in his neck and another which entered his brain from below his right ear. He died in hospital the following day. Five other people were injured but survived.

Sirhan - a Palestinian refugee who said he wanted to "sacrifice" Kennedy "for the cause of the poor exploited people" - was quickly apprehended. He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment. "Sirhan was apprehended at the scene with literally a smoking gun," said acoustic forensic expert Philip Van Praag of PVP Designs, who has carried out the new analysis. "At the beginning many people looked upon this as an open-and-shut case. It was one man, Sirhan Sirhan, who was observed by a number of people, who aimed and fired a gun in the direction of Kennedy's entourage."

But the lone gunman explanation has always looked shaky. The autopsy of Kennedy's body suggested that all four shots that hit him came from behind, and powder marks on his skin showed they must have been from close range. But Sirhan was in front of Kennedy when he fired, and after shooting two shots was overcome by hotel staff, who pinned him to a table. Also, Sirhan fired eight shots in total, yet 14 were found lodged around the room and in the victims. "There is no doubt in our minds that no fewer than 14 shots were fired in the pantry on that evening and that Sirhan did not in fact kill Senator Kennedy," said Robert Joling, a forensic scientist who has been involved with the Kennedy case for nearly 40 years. He and Van Praag have published a book on the killing this week entitled "An Open and Shut Case".

The inconsistencies in the case have bred numerous conspiracy theories, including the involvement of the CIA and the idea that Sirhan - who claims not to remember the shooting and pleaded insanity at his trial - was a "Manchurian Candidate" assassin who was hypnotically programmed to kill the senator.

Now Van Praag has added new weight to the 'two shooters' theory. He reanalysed the only audio recording of the shooting, which was made by an independent journalist, Stanislaw Pruszynski. "At the time Pruszynski was not even aware that his recorder was still on," said Van Praag. The recording quality is poor, but it is possible to make out 13 shots over the course of just over 5 seconds, before what Van Praag describes as "blood-curdling screams" obscure the sound. That is more than the eight rounds that Sirhan's cheap Iver Johnson Cadet 55 revolver carried.

Also, there are two pairs of double shots that occurred so close together it is inconceivable that Sirhan could have fired them all. The third and fourth shots and the seventh and eighth were separated by 122 and 149 milliseconds respectively. In tests, a trained firearms expert firing under ideal conditions could only manage 366 milliseconds between shots using the same weapon. And he was not being pinned to a table at the time.

Lastly, five of the shots - 3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 in the sequence - were found to have odd acoustic characteristics when specific frequencies were analysed separately. Van Praag thinks this is because they came from a different gun pointing away from Pruszynski's microphone.

To recreate this he recorded the sounds made by firing the Iver Johnson and another revolver, a Harrington and Richardson 922. At least one member of Kennedy's entourage was carrying this weapon when the killing happened. In the acoustic tests it produced the same frequency anomalies Van Praag had seen in the original recording but only when fired away from the microphone. He presented his results on Thursday at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington DC.

Paul Schrade, a close associate of Kennedy's who was director of the United Auto Workers union, was at the senator's side in the pantry and was shot in the head. He told the meeting that America lost an outstanding leader and potentially great president that day. "I think we were in a position of really changing this country," he said. "What we lost was a real hope and possibility of having a better country and having better relations around the world."

He wants to see the case reopened and properly investigated. "We're going to go ahead and do our best to find out who the second gunman was and that's going to take a lot of work," he said. Van Praag also wants the case reexamined. "We would hope that the evidence that we have uncovered ... would make a strong enough case to get serious consideration once again by the authorities," he said.

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday March 3 2008

In the report below (regarding new interpretations of forensic evidence relating to the assassination of Robert Kennedy) we stated that he was hit by four shots. However, only three bullets entered his body; the fourth was lodged in a shoulder pad. One of the pistols referred to was a Harrington & Richardson and not, as we had it, a Harrison & Richardson. This has been corrected.

Source: Guardian

Cape High Court confirm evitions

The Cape High Court on Monday dismissed an application for leave to appeal against an eviction order that compelled illegal occupiers of unfinished homes in Delft on the Cape Flats to vacate their houses by 6pm last Sunday.

Grounds for the application for leave to appeal were that the court had erred in treating the eviction application as urgent, in the first instance, and in making the provisional eviction order that was granted final. A third ground was that the scheduled eviction of about 1 600 people was not just and equitable, and a fourth was that the court should instead order mediation through the authorities and the illegal occupiers.

Judge Deon van Zyl ruled late on Monday that the grounds were altogether without merit and that no other court would reach a conclusion different to his.

Earlier on Monday, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign said: "The residents have vowed not to stop the fight. They are now preparing to petition the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein and thereafter will take their fight to the Constitutional Court. "The judge and African National Congress government and Thubelisha Homes are treating the residents of Delft as if they have alternative accommodation. Yet not one of them has any place to go. All of those who moved into the new houses were either homeless or backyard dwellers."

Asked when evictions would get under way, Thubelisha general manager Xhanti Sigcawu said he was expecting to hear from the sheriff before the end of the day. "We'll take our cue from the sheriff," he said.

Source: Mail & Guardian

ANC is committed to protecting free speech

In the front of his book The Fourth Estate, ex-editor of the Sunday Times Joel Mervis quotes former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who in 1937 said: "What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility, a prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages".

Part of the ANC's resolution calling for debate on the Media Appeals Tribunal deals with accountability of the media.

Noting that "freedom of expression in society, including freedom of media, is located within the context of the Constitution of the Republic" and that the "media conducts itself in many instances to the detriment of the constitutional rights of others", the organisation argues that the media should contribute to the transformation of this new society and "be accountable for its actions".

What these quotes show is that the increasing exasperation felt by South Africans about media in general and the commercial press in particular, is not unique to South Africa. Of course here the dynamics are decidedly different from Britain in the 1930s, but the problem is the same a media that believes it is not subject to societal accountability. The most problematic fact about the South African media landscape is the lack of a diverse ownership profile, which in turn has an impact on the media products on offer from the commercial press.

Three large companies, Media 24, Independent Group and Johncom (the latter recently renamed Avuso), own virtually all the newspapers in this country. The vast majority publish only in English and Afrikaans. In the middle of last year, the ANC policy conference adopted the resolution cited above. It called for an investigation of the feasibility of establishing a Media Appeals Tribunal. This resolution was confirmed at the ANC's December conference in Polokwane. Not surprisingly, the commercial press is opposed to this idea. They argue that it is tantamount to interfering with the freedom of expression and freedom of media guaranteed under the Constitution.

The actual resolutions are interesting to read and should in fact be broadly circulated so that they can form the basis for public debate around the role of the media in a society in transition. Not surprisingly the print media has gone into attack mode and sensationalised the proposals as an attempt to control the media. What they fail to appreciate is that this is precisely the type of response that confirms to the public that the media is unwilling to introspect or acknowledge that there are problems.

On the whole, space is not provided for critical, independent-minded black people to air their views either about the media or matters that would upset white people. There are exceptions. When editor of The Star Moegsien Williams approached me in 2006 to write for the Independent Group, he stressed that he wished to make the opinion pages of more representative. City Press is also an exception. It is always possible to trivialise the ANC's concerns as an attempt to force the press to be less critical of it or the government. There is a far bigger body of public opinion that believes the commercial press does not reflect post-apartheid reality.

The resolution is a reflection of long and frustrating appeals to the media to respect the rights of all people and to try to be present in this democratic phase instead of being stuck in a default consciousness from our unequal past. If a referendum were to be to be held on the establishment of an Appeals Tribunal, it is probable most Africans who read the commercial press would say yes to the question of whether or not it should be established. The resolution reaffirms the ANC's commitment to media freedom, which it says is entrenched. It notes "that the ANC is faced with a major ideological offensive, largely driven by the opposition and factions in the mainstream media, whose key objective is the promotion of market fundamentalism, control of the media and the images it creates of a new democratic dispensation in order to retain old apartheid economic and social relations".

The ANC envisages the Tribunal to be a forum where the rights to freedom of expression can be balanced with other constitutional rights. It would adjudicate complaints by individuals against the print media in the same way as BCCSA and the Complaints and Compliance Committee of Icasa do in respect of the electronic media.

They believe that the Tribunal would not supplant, but strengthen the current Ombudsperson"s office. These are proposals for discussion. Despite my longstanding criticisms of the commercial press in this country, I have serious reservations about the desirability of such a Media Tribunal. While the motivation is persuasive, it is not likely to work in practice. It has the potential for acting as an editorial constraint, which is not at all what the intention is. The sense of responsibility and accountability that we seek as a nation, cannot be achieved through such a mechanism.

Other ways of ensuring representivity in the newsrooms and ownership is for Black business to either buy into existing media houses or set up their own. Also, all of us have a choice as to which newspapers to read. If papers do not reflect all perspectives, buy the one that does. Those who read poor quality newspapers out of habit, deserve to be aggravated. The key issue raised in the resolution is that as a matter of urgency the commercial press must be brought into the BEE charter processes.

The print media should give their readers an opportunity to debate the resolution by extracting it and giving a fair opportunity to ANC to explain to the public why they came to this conclusion. Scare tactics won't assist a balanced discussion of the implications. This is a chance for the commercial press to turn over a new leaf and to listen to the public. Humility can go a long way.

Source: IoL

ANC rejects concerns over press freedom

South Africa's ruling African National Congress on Sunday rejected media accusations that its proposal for a new media complaints body was an attack on press freedom. The ANC said it had a good record on free speech in the country's vibrant media and said the press was over-reacting to the planned Media Appeals Tribunal, which would be accountable to parliament. "The aim is to strengthen the self-regulation mechanism of the print media... There is no such thing as an attack on media freedom," ANC Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe told the South African National Editors Forum, the Sapa news agency reported.

At a congress in December the party called for the creation of a tribunal through which the public could file complaints against the media. How the new body would work in practice is not yet clear. South Africa already has an press ombudsman that deals with complaints. Relations between South Africa's government and its independent media has been strained at times, with ANC leaders often accusing it of harbouring a racist agenda. "As usual the media are over-reacting," Motlanthe said. "They say that the ANC is hyper-sensitive to criticism but look at the reaction of the media to this (the tribunal). They see it as an attack on media freedom," he said.

Pallo Jordan, a senior ANC member and minister of arts and culture, said media freedom had been "on the masthead of the ANC since its inception". "There is no (South African) political party with a comparable record on media freedom," Sapa quoted him as saying. "We value it ... it lends quality to our democracy and it should prevail," he added.

South Africa's print media is mainly privately owned, while the broadcast media is still dominated by state-owned SABC.

Source: IoL

CIA admit 'waterboarding' al-Qaida suspects

Interrogators used "waterboarding" on three men shortly after the September 11 attacks, the CIA admitted today, naming for the first time the victims of a technique widely perceived as torture.

The men subjected to waterboarding, which simulates drowning, were al-Qaida suspects Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the CIA director, Michael Hayden, told the US Congress. "We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time," Hayden said. "There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed."

Hayden told the senate intelligence committee that Mohammed - the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks - and the other two men were subject to waterboarding in 2002 and 2003. "The circumstances are different than they were in late 2001, early 2002," Hayden said, adding that he opposed limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques permitted in the US Army field manual, which bans waterboarding. Hayden told the committee that fewer than 100 people had been held in the CIA's terrorism detention and interrogation programme, with less than one-third subjected to "coercive" techniques. The CIA said in December that it had destroyed videotapes depicting the interrogations of Zubaydah and Nashiri, prompting a justice department investigation. The tapes were destroyed as Congress moved to pass a ban on inhumane interrogations and a prosecutor is investigating whether US intelligence officials broke the law or violated court orders in destroying the tapes.

In waterboarding, the victim's mouth is covered and water poured over his face, making the victim feel as if they are drowning. "Waterboarding taken to its extreme, could be death - you could drown someone," McConnell acknowledged. He said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA's arsenal, but it would require the consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.

At the same hearing, the US director of national intelligence said the Taliban, which was overthrown in Afghanistan in late 2001, has expanded its operations into once-peaceful areas of western Afghanistan and around the capital, Kabul, despite the death or capture of three top commanders in the last year. McConnell also said al-Qaida maintains a "safe haven" in Pakistan's tribal areas, where the group is able to stage attacks supporting the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan. The Pakistani tribal areas provide al-Qaida "many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan, albeit on a smaller and less secure scale", allowing militants to train for strikes in Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa and the US, McConnell said. "Al-Qaida remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States, both here at home and abroad," McConnell said, even though the terror network had suffered setbacks in Iraq. He expressed concern that al-Qaida in Iraq is shifting its focus elsewhere in the region. "They may deploy resources to mount attacks outside the country," McConnell said, although fewer than 100 terrorists have moved to establish cells in other countries. McConnell also told the senate panel that US officials believe that Osama bin Laden is hiding in Pakistan's tribal areas. A report released in London said nearly 400 militant groups now operate around the world and the greatest proliferation has been in the border regions between Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

The number of violent "non-state" groups has grown about 10% in the past year, according to the 2008 military balance report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Iraq and India, with more than 30 active guerrilla groups each, are the most volatile countries, the report said, with the Afghan-Pakistan border and the disputed Kashmir region between India and Pakistan the worst-affected areas.

Source: Guardian

South African court rules against extraditing Radovan Krejčíř

One of the country’s most notorious fugitives, billionaire Radovan Krejčíř, is another step closer to escaping Czech justice forever. Almost a year after he was arrested in South Africa, a Johannesburg court on Friday ruled against his extradition to the Czech Republic. The court said that the murder plot and three-billion-crown tax fraud he was accused of are not considered crimes in South Africa.

The news from Johannesburg was a bad blow for the Czech Republic where Krejčíř has already been sentenced in absentia to six and a half years for tax fraud and is charged with a variety of other crimes including conspiracy to murder, counterfeiting, extortion and abduction. Although the prosecutor in the case Deon Barnard is mulling over whether to file an appeal, saying he needs more time to study the court's justification of its decision, the Czech Justice Ministry has not given up on the case. On Friday the ministry’s spokeswoman Zuzana Kuncová read out a brief statement to the press: “The Czech Republic has cooperated fully with the South African authorities in this extradition request and we are prepared to continue doing so in the future. Friday’s ruling is that of an independent court in a sovereign state and the ministry is not in a position to pass judgment on it.”

Radovan Krejčíř has thumbed his nose at the Czech authorities for years. He first gained notoriety by giving the police the slip while they were raiding his luxury villa in Prague and escaping to the Seychelles where he and his family lived for two years – beyond the reach of Czech justice. The Interior Ministry vowed to catch up with him and when in April of last year he was apprehended at Johannesburg airport in South Africa Czech Interior Minister Ivan Langer said this was a message to all criminals that one could not escape justice forever. On Friday a triumphant Radovan Krejčíř parodied the minister’s words from Johannesburg: “I have two messages for my countrymen. First good news for all the decent people like myself – namely that justice has been done. And I have bad news for all the corrupt politicians back home, whom I warn that the truth will eventually come out and every one of them will be held accountable.”

Krejčíř’s latest triumph in his cat and mouse game with the Czech authorities is a major embarrassment, especially since the Czech side made some procedural mistakes which slowed down the Johannesburg court case, while Krejčíř never put a foot wrong. He had clearly studied the South African legal system in great detail and has asked for political asylum in the country. A decision on that request may take years and Krejčíř cannot be extradited before it is reached. If the court decides that it has reason to do so, which at present seems more unlikely than ever.

Source: Radio Praha

Fidentia financial director gets jail time

The financial director of Fidentia, Graham Maddock, was on Friday effectively jailed for seven years on 54 counts involving fraud, theft, money laundering, contraventions of the Financial Intelligence Centre Act and the reckless or fraudulent conduct of business. Maddock appeared in the Bellville Specialised Commercial Crime Court before magistrate Amrith Chabilall. His wife and family sat on benches behind the dock, and all embraced him before the police court orderly led him from the courtroom to the holding cells to be transported to Pollsmoor Prison. The hearing took the form of a plea-bargain agreement. Although the charges concerned his involvement with J Arthur Brown's Fidentia group as its financial director, Maddock's chartered accounting firm, Maddock Incorporated, was cited in the plea-bargain agreement as accused number one, and Maddock as accused number two.

Scorpions prosecutor senior counsel Bruce Morrison said the case was the fist time in South African legal history that any company had been found guilty of money laundering -- especially involving a sum of R200-million. Maddock was in the dock in his personal capacity, as well as representing Maddock Incorporated. Morrison said Maddock Incorporated was in fact Maddock's alter ego. The firm itself was fined R50-million for money laundering, but the fine was suspended for five years. For five violations of the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, the firm was fined an additional R10-million, also suspended for five years.

Morrison said the sentences imposed on both were a message to other accountable institutions that they had to comply with the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, as well as the Prevention of Organised Crime Act. Morrison added: "When we come after them, this is the kind of fine they will have to pay." On the money laundering charges, the plea agreement said Maddock's conduct was deliberately orchestrated by Brown.

Source: Mail & Guardian

Shielding Wall Street, US Supreme Court rejects Enron fraud case

Without explanation, the US Supreme Court Tuesday dismissed a lawsuit brought by pension and investment funds against major Wall Street banks for their part in the massive financial fraud carried out by the Enron Corporation, the Houston-based energy trading giant.

The suit sought to recover some $40 billion that were lost when Enron went bankrupt in late 2001. It charged the banks, including Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse Group, Barclays Plc and other leading financial houses, with helping company executives cover up a mounting cash flow problem by disguising loans as revenues, setting up off-the-books partnerships and hiding losses in order to defraud investors.

The rejection of the case—an appeal of a lower court ruling barring the funds from suing the banks—came just one week after a 5-3 ruling that protected banks and other businesses that help companies falsify their financial pictures in order to defraud investors from lawsuits based on the federal securities fraud laws.

That ruling, issued in the case of Stoneridge Investment Partners, LLC v. Scientific-Atlanta, Inc., together with the dismissal of the Enron appeal are only the latest in a series of pro-business, anti-investor decisions from the Court designed to kill securities fraud lawsuits.

The Stonebridge decision was written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, who failed to take part in the deliberations on the Enron case. While Kennedy offered no explanation for his absence, the justice’s son is an investment banker at Credit Suisse in New York City.

The Stonebridge case charged that an accounting fraud by Charter Communications Inc., a St. Louis cable operator, was carried out with the collaboration of cable-television box manufacturers Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta (now owned by Cisco systems).

According to the lawsuit, Charter overpaid Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta $17 million for cable boxes, which the two manufacturers then kicked back to the operators by purchasing advertising, allowing Charter to add the money to its books as phony revenue.

In writing the majority decision, Kennedy made it clear that a key consideration was that holding such companies accountable for investment fraud could be bad for Wall Street. Allowing shareholder suits in such cases, he wrote, “may raise the cost of being a publicly traded company under our law and shift securities offerings away from domestic capital markets.”

Justice Stephen Breyer did not participate in the case, because he is a stockholder in Cisco Systems Inc., Scientific-Atlanta’s parent company.

Even a brief review of the decision and the history of the federal antifraud securities laws reveals that the ruling is utterly cynical, dishonest and result-driven.

In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and in response to widespread fraud in the securities industry, the US Congress enacted the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The 1933 law regulates the initial distribution of company shares, and the 1934 Act, for the most part, regulates post-distribution trading.

The general anti-fraud provision of the 1934 Act, Section 10(b), states:

“It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce or of the mails, or of any facility of any national securities exchange... To use or employ, in connection with the purchase or sale of any security registered on a national securities exchange or any security not so registered, any manipulative or deceptive device or contrivance in contravention of such rules and regulations as the Securities and Exchange Commission [the SEC, a federal agency] may prescribe.”

In 1942 the SEC adopted such a Rule, 10b-5, which provides that “It shall be unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly, by the use of any means or instrumentality of interstate commerce, or of the mails or of any facility of any national securities exchange, (a) To employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud, (b) To make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading, or (c) To engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person in connection with the purchase or sale of any security.”

Long ago, the Supreme Court approved suits for damages by private investors for violations of section 10(b) and SEC Rule 10b-5. Typically investors sue under the portion of Rule 10b-5 that forbids making false or incomplete statements. In those cases, the courts have required that the investors prove that they relied on fraudulent statements or a cover-up of information when buying or selling shares.

In a 1994 case, Central Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank, the Supreme Court decided that persons or businesses that knowingly or recklessly give “substantial assistance” to a company engaged in such deception cannot be held liable for defrauding investors. In a decision written by Justice Anthony Kennedy and backed by four other right-wing justices (former Chief Justice Rehnquist, retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and present Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas), the Court refused, in the absence of a specific law passed by Congress, to apply the longstanding legal principle of aiding and abetting to those who help companies misrepresent or omit information in order to defraud investors, even if they themselves are not directly responsible for giving investors the misinformation.

In deciding the Central Bank case the Court however expressly recognized that the “commission of a manipulative act” was another, alternative basis for liability under 10(b) apart from directly making a misstatement. The Court decision said: “The absence of 10(b) aiding and abetting liability does not mean that secondary actors in the securities markets are always free from liability under the securities Acts. Any person or entity, including a lawyer, accountant, or bank, who employs a manipulative device or makes a material misstatement (or omission) on which a purchaser or seller of securities relies may be liable as a primary violator under 10b-5.” The Court stressed that the plaintiffs in the Central Bank case had conceded that the defendant bank had not committed a manipulative or deceptive act within the meaning of 10(b).

But in the Stoneridge case decided last week, the cable box manufacturers were charged with engaging precisely in such a manipulative or deceptive act.

The box suppliers knew that Charter wanted to use the kickback of money from the inflated cable box purchases in the form of advertising sales to inflate the company’s revenue picture by $17 million. Charter used the scheme to issue quarterly reports that would meet Wall Street expectations for operating cash flow and maintain its share price.

In order to keep Charter’s auditing firm from discovering the link between Charter’s increased payments for the boxes and the advertising purchases, the companies drafted documents to make it appear the transactions were unrelated and conducted in the ordinary course of business. The cable box companies sent documents to Charter falsely stating they had increased production costs on the boxes. Also, the new set-top box agreements were also backdated to make it appear that they were negotiated a month before the advertising agreements.

A class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of purchasers of Charter’s shares against not only Charter, but the cable box companies as well. The lawsuit charged that the companies were liable because they knowingly participated in a scheme that was aimed at and succeeded in inflating Charter’s revenue. If the companies had not assisted Charter, Charter’s auditor would not have been fooled, and the false financial statements would not have been issued.

Under this “scheme liability” legal theory, many banks and other companies had been successfully sued for assisting in massive accounting fraud by the likes of Enron and WorldCom in the 1990s. Nonetheless, the cable box companies succeed in getting the case dismissed in the lower courts.

Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision in the Stonebridge case, was also the author of the 1994 decision. This time Kennedy was again joined by the far-right wing bloc of Justices—Scalia and Thomas, along with current Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

In refusing to hold the cable box companies liable, Kennedy wrote that since they had not themselves made the public misstatements as to Charter’s revenues, to hold them liable would in effect permit the sort of aider and abettor liability thrown out in the Central Bank case. The investors, Kennedy wrote, were required to show they relied on these the manufacturing companies’ deceptive actions but could not do so “except in an indirect chain that we find too remote for liability.”

This is legal sophistry. Kennedy and the majority ignored that the conduct alleged was critically different from the Central Bank case because the bank in that case did not itself engage in a proscribed deceptive act and, therefore, did not itself directly violate section 10(b) and Rule 10b-5. In other words, they ignored their express recognition in Central Bank that such conduct is an additional ground for liability beyond that arising from publicly making a misstatement.

There is no reason to impose the requirement that investors prove they relied on misinformation produced by the companies’ actions to find them liable. Under the plain language of the statute banning deceptive practices, the real question is instead whether the defendants’ conduct caused the investors to purchase their shares under false pretenses.

In a dissenting opinion in the Stoneridge case, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the acts of the cable box companies were enough to impose liability because they had the foreseeable effect of causing investors to purchase their shares under false pretenses. The law has long treated a misrepresentation made to a third person the maker intends or has reason to expect will be repeated or its substance communicated to the victim the same as direct falsehoods for liability purposes. For all practical purposes the sham transactions the manufacturing companies engaged in had the same effect on Charter’s profit and loss statement as if they had themselves made false entries directly on Charter’s books.

The Stoneridge ruling cannot be seen as anything other than a political decision to serve the reactionary economic interests of finance capital. In an interview with the New York Times, J. Edward Ketz, an associate professor of accounting at Pennsylvania State University’s Smeal College of Business, called the ruling “a travesty of justice” and a “huge step backwards in the fight to prevent further accounting frauds from harming investors and the American economy.”

The ruling provoked an audible sigh of relief on Wall Street and from such employers’ groups as the National Association of Manufacturers, because of fear that a ruling in the investors’ favor would have left large numbers of companies and banks vulnerable to lawsuits over the massive fraud that has characterized the US economy.

The ruling is particularly timely given the unwinding of the sub-prime mortgage scandal. Many investment and commercial banks that might otherwise face liability to investors under the securities laws will be able now to dodge it. The banks created all sorts of formally separate “off balance sheet” entities to foist packages of such mortgages onto investors. They will argue that, as in Stoneridge, only those entities and not the banks themselves should be liable for any fraud relating to the real value of these mortgages.

Source: Word Socialist Web Site

Selebi accepted R1.2m in bribes, NPA claims.

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) intends to tell the Pretoria high court that convicted drug dealer Glen Agliotti's friendship with Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi became corrupt at Selebi's insistence.

This is contained in the NPA's indictment against Selebi. The document was attached to the NPA's responding affidavit to Selebi's attempt to get the authority to halt his prosecution in the court yesterday.

Selebi is alleged to have accepted at least R1.2 million in bribes that "made no legitimate business sense" from Agliotti and others.

Source: Highbeam

Belgians killed in Yemen attack

Two female Belgian tourists and their driver have been killed after gunmen ambushed their convoy in eastern Yemen, officials say. Four other Belgians were hurt in the attack in the province of Hadramut. The Yemeni authorities have launched a hunt for the attackers, who they believe to be al-Qaeda militants. Last July, seven Spaniards and two Yemenis were killed when a suicide car bomber attacked a group of tourists visiting a temple in central Yemen.

The Belgian tourists were attacked as they travelled through Wadi Dawan, a desert valley about 300km (180 miles) east of the capital Sanaa. Survivor Karina Lambert said the convoy was ambushed by four gunmen hiding behind a truck parked at the side of the road. "They immediately started firing on three of the jeeps, the fourth one was further back so it was not hit," she said in a telephone interview with Belgian TV. "They wanted to kill, that's sure because after the first bursts of machine-gun fire, they approached the vehicles and fired into the cars." There are reports of a fourth fatality, with Reuters news agency citing the victim as a Yemeni national.

Belgian Foreign Minister Karel De Gucht identified one of the victims as Claudine Van Caille, 65, from Bruges. The family of the other female victim has not yet been informed. Mr de Gucht said he was horrified by the attack and that he had sent a "clear message" to the Yemeni government to hunt down the killers. Tourists are often drawn to Wadi Dawan area to visit the famous multi-storey mud buildings in the nearby town of Shibam. Al-Qaeda has been blamed for a series of attacks in Yemen, the ancestral home of the group's leader Osama Bin Laden.

In July 2006 seven Spanish tourists and their two local drivers died when a suicide bomber rammed his car packed with explosives into their vehicles. That was the most deadly attack on Westerners in the country since 17 US soldiers aboard the USS Cole were killed when the ship was attacked by al-Qaeda militants as it rested in port in Aden. In recent years Yemen's government has been fighting Islamists with the help of US special forces based in Djibouti, on the Horn of Africa.

Source: BBC

Let's all arrest one another; South Africa

IT SEEMS, for the moment, as if South Africa's governing class is being engulfed by charges of corruption. Three weeks ago it was the turn of Jacob Zuma, the newly elected leader of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). He was charged with fraud, tax evasion and money laundering and is due in court in August.

This week it was the turn of Jackie Selebi, the head of the police. The National Prosecuting Authority says it will charge him with corruption and "defeating the ends of justice". He has been suspended from his job and he also resigned as head of Interpol, the international police body.

Source: Highbeam

Agliotti fingers Gauteng director general

Gauteng’s top official, provincial Director General Mogopodi Mokoena, co-owned a company with Brett Kebble’s murderer, Clint Nassif, and accepted a R250 000 cheque from him.

Mokoena’s links with Nassif were among issues raised by Glenn Agliotti in an affidavit the National Prosecuting Authority submitted to court last week in response to Jackie Selebi’s application to block his prosecution.

Agliotti stated: ‘Clint Nassif had a company with a member of the Gauteng local government [in reality, the provincial government] by the name of Machabudi [Mogopodi]. This was done, to secure other tenders from the government.”

Nassif and Agliotti were both involved with mining boss Kebble’s security and dirty tricks operation. Both have admitted to a role in Kebble’s ‘assisted suicide” and both have pleaded guilty in a massive drugs case.

Mokoena this week denied the company had pursued any government contracts and claimed that by the time he ‘pulled out” after the Mail & Guardian exposed Agliotti, Nassif and their links with Kebble and Selebi in May 2005, it had done no deals.

Mokoena also said: ‘If I knew who they were, I would not have met them or even had coffee with them.”

However, the M&G has independently established:

Mokoena accepted a R250 000 cheque from Nassif, supposedly to help him (Mokoena) buy a house at the luxury Zimbali resort in ­KwaZulu-Natal. Mokoena refused to confirm or deny this.

The company that Mokoena, Nassif and some of Nassif’s associates co-owned, the unusually named Add Kalusha to Legora Investment Holdings, owned major assets within Nassif’s Central National Security group. Mokoena claimed that if this was the case, it was after he had left.

It is alleged that Mokoena ‘pulled strings” to help a property developer acquire provincial government land by paying an ‘under the table” amount of more than R1-million. Mokoena denied knowing ‘anything about that”. He said he did not even know the name of the property developer, whose name the M&G is withholding for legal reasons.

Company records show that Mokoena, Nassif, and two of Nassif’s partners in the Central National Security group became directors of Add Kalusha to Legora Investment Holdings in November 2005, two months after Kebble’s death.

A source with direct knowledge, but who requested anonymity, told the M&G that Nassif wrote a R250 000 cheque for Mokoena soon after that. The source understood it to be to help Mokoena pay for the Zimbali house.

Mokoena refused to confirm or deny the payment, but reiterated that ‘Nassif doesn’t have any contracts from government, and I did not help him get contracts from government”.

The same source claimed that Mokoena had ‘pulled strings” to help the property developer acquire government land in the south of Johannesburg, and that the developer had made the ‘under the table” payment to be shared by Nassif, Mokoena and another person. The M&G has not been able to verify the allegation.

With regard to Add Kalusha, Mokoena said: ‘It was a company we were establishing to look at opportunities in general — We were going to buy properties. It was hardly six months. Immediately after that, when I knew who they were, I pulled out ­completely.”

Company records confirm that Mokoena resigned as a director effective May 31 2006, shortly after the M&G‘s exposé of Nassif and company. Mokoena claims that by that time Add Kalusha had done no deals and had no assets.

The M&G has established from a source close to the transaction that by the time Nassif and his associates sold Add Kalusha to Savika, another security group, it owned substantial assets in the security field, including the Central National Security group’s guarding, monitoring and response contracts and cars, radios and ­firearms.

This was about four months after Mokoena resigned, company records show.

Mokoena claimed that if Add Kalusha had such assets it would have acquired them after he left. This is partly contradicted by a businessman who knew Nassif well. He told the M&G his understanding was that ‘Mogopodi was supposed to be a shareholder in CNSG [Central National Security Group]”.

Source: Mail & Guardian

NEC to discuss fate of Scorpions

The ANC's national executive committee (NEC) lekgotla, which starts on Friday, provides the new party leadership with its first real opportunity to put its policy stamp on the country, but budgetary and statutory constraints will force some painful compromises. Decisions on policy were taken at the party's national conference in December. Now the leaders must find a way - and the money - to implement them.

Among these decisions are the controversial plan to disband the National Prosecuting Authority's (NPA) Directorate Special Operations (the Scorpions) by June; providing free education to the poor up to undergraduate level; expanding "no-fee" schools to 60 percent by 2009; extending child support grants from 14 to 18 years; and providing antiretroviral treatment at all health facilities. Someone is going to have to pay. And although the newly empowered Left has long objected to President Thabo Mbeki and Finance Minister Trevor Manuel's budget surplus, ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe said this week the party would not deliberately eradicate that surplus in pursuit of greater social spending.

Most of the policy decisions are not new - some date back to the national conference of 1997 - but ANC leaders came under renewed pressure in Polokwane to speed up implementation. NEC members, ministers, directors-general and other government officials involved in policy implementation will therefore meet over the next three days to find a way to do this. The meeting takes place amid great division and uncertainty - government officials fear for their positions.

The new party leadership under Jacob Zuma will be imposing ANC policy on a government led by Mbeki, who is still smarting from his defeat in Polokwane. High on the list of things to do will be to decide the future of the Scorpions. The ANC plan involves moving Scorpions investigators back to the SAPS and sending its prosecutors to the NPA, effectively disbanding the crack crime-fighting unit. But this will not be as easy as it sounds.

Scorpions investigators are governed by the NPA Act (and derived regulations). The police are governed by the Public Service Act. Moving them to the SAPS will require a new law - something that will not be achieved within the six-month deadline. Since Scorpions investigators are better paid than their counterparts in the SAPS, they are unlikely to accept the unilateral amendment of their service conditions should they be incorporated into the SAPS. This also presents problems in terms of labour law. Similarly, SAPS officers are unlikely to accept a dual pay structure within the police force. It is hard to see how the party will get around these issues, and they will probably not be resolved by June.

In other policy, the party has recognised that the poor are likely to be hardest hit by the effects of climate change and committed itself to treat this issue as "a new threat on a global scale". The suggestion to make antiretroviral treatment available at all government medical institutions will no doubt be welcomed, but implementation will be hampered by costs and the lack of trained health care workers. The plan to classify HIV and Aids as a notifiable disease is likely to spark heated debate in Midrand.

The party also plans to scrap the unpopular floor-crossing legislation and develop a "regulatory architecture" for private funding of political parties.

The decision to establish a statutory Media Appeals Tribunal to compliment existing self-regulatory mechanisms in the print media environment will also be discussed.

Source: IoL

Who Really Killed Thomas Sankara?

As the Charles Taylor trial continues, African historian Carina Ray looks at the possibility that Taylor was complicit in Sankara's assassination.

In January 2008, after much delay, the trial of former Liberian president, Charles Ghankay Taylor, is scheduled to begin at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Taylor faces an 11-count indictment for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and other violations of international humanitarian law. These charges stem from his involvement in the atrocities committed during Sierra Leone’s armed conflict dating back to 1996, and more specifically his support of the main rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), headed by Foday Sankoh. The brutality of the war and its direct toll on the civilian population are most visible today in the thousands of amputees throughout Sierra Leone whose limbs were hacked off in a bid to stifle civilian resistance through fear. While Taylor’s path of destruction arguably came to its apex during the war in Sierra Leone, his history prior to that also deserves our scrutiny since we know his much longer record of wanton destabilization in West Africa is precisely what allowed him to wield so much power within the RUF.

In particular, Taylor’s return to West Africa from the United States in 1985 and the events that followed deserve our attention. Taylor arrived in Ghana after escaping from a prison in Boston, Massachusetts where he was being held pending extradition to Liberia on embezzlement charges levied against him by the Doe regime. Ghanaian authorities eventually jailed Taylor twice for his increasingly subversive activities. By 1987, however, he had arrived in Burkina Faso. The approximate timing of his appearance in the country coincided with the assassination of President Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso, on 15 October 1987.

While it is commonly accepted that Burkina Faso’s current head of state, Blaise Compaore, ordered Sankara’s assassination after their once close relationship soured, for years people have also been linking Taylor to the assassination. In 1993 Liberian economist, S. Byron Tarr, published an article in the respected academic journal, Issue: A Journal of Opinion, on the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group’s (ECOMOG) intervention in the Liberian civil war (1989-1996). Therein Tarr gave the most detailed account to date of Taylor’s movements prior to Sankara’s assassination. According to Tarr, in 1987 Taylor approached the Burkinabe embassy in Accra to ask for assistance in overthrowing the Doe regime in Liberia. The Burkinabe ambassador to Ghana, Madam Mamouna Ouattara, a Compaore loyalist, appears to have solicited Compaore’s assistance in getting the Ghanaian authorities to release Taylor into Burkinabe custody. This was facilitated by the fact that Ghana neither wanted to hand Taylor over to the Americans nor to Doe, and so Rawlings apparently released him to Compaore who had come to Accra as part of a mediation process Rawlings had undertaken to resolve the mounting disagreements between Sankara and Compaore. Tarr, notes that “Not long after Taylor was delivered to Compaore, Sankara was murdered.” In exchange for Taylor’s assistance in carrying out Sankara’s assassination, Tarr suggests that Compaore provided assistance to Taylor who was in the process of organizing the guerilla war that would eventually lead to the overthrow of the Doe regime. Crucially, Compaore is believed to have introduced Taylor to Libyan president, Muammar Qaddafi. Taylor and his recruits subsequently traveled to Libya where they underwent guerrilla training and formed a strategic alliance with Qaddafi who supported his desire to overthrow the Doe regime. The training he gained there was critical to his ability to launch the Liberian civil war in 1989 from his base in Ivory Coast. This general version of events has been echoed more recently in articles that have appeared in several other forums, including the Liberian Democratic Future’s (LDF) on-line newsmagazine, The Perspective, and The Liberian Mandingo Association of New York’s website.

It must be pointed out, however, that this version of events has been called into question. Ghanaian political scientist Eboe Hutchful who serves as the executive director of the Accra-based NGO, African Security Dialogue and Research, has suggested that his Ghanaian informants dispute the idea that Ghana released Taylor to Compaore; rather they contend that he was taken to the Ivorian border and released there. From Ivory Coast he is said to have made his way to Burkina Faso, “where the Libyans introduced him to Compaore,” rather than the other way around. Moreover, Hutchful suggests that Sankara may have already been killed by the time the Ghanaian authorities released Taylor.

The striking aspect of each of these sources is that they treat Taylor’s possible involvement in Sankara’s assassination as a side note. To date, the question of what role he played in organizing and carrying out Sankara’s murder has not been the focal point of investigation.

In March 2006 the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that Sankara’s family has “the right to know the circumstances of his death.” Any attempt to shed light on these circumstances, therefore, must seriously consider whether Taylor was involved in the assassination, and if so, to what extent and under whose direction.

Source:  pambazuka

Charges against Gerrie Nel withdrawn

Charges against Gerrie Nel, the head of the Directorate of Special Operations (DSO), or the Scorpions, in Gauteng, were withdrawn in the Pretoria Regional Court on Monday "After careful consideration of the evidence in the docket, the decision was made to withdraw the charges," chief prosecutor Matric Lupondo said during Nel's brief appearance.

Nel, who was dressed in a grey suit, managed to avoid the media, who were waiting outside court to get his reaction to the decision. "We are relieved with the outcome and Mr Nel just wants to go back to work and carry out his duties at the DSO," his legal counsel, Ian Small Smith, said. Nel was arrested at his Pretoria home in front of his wife and children at roughly 9pm last Tuesday by about 20 armed policemen. Although the charges were withdrawn, they could be reinstated at some stage, but Small Smith said he doubted this would happen. "They [the police] were widely criticised after the arrest, after [which] the senior prosecutor felt there wasn't a case, which means he should not have been arrested in the first instance, as there was not a case -- so I will be very surprised if there is another arrest," he said. He said should the police decide to recharge Nel, they could just ask him to hand himself over instead of arresting him again.

Small Smith believes that Nel should sue the state for wrongful arrest, but says this is for Nel to decide. "You have to understand that because of his position, there are other role-players here as well ...he is a responsible person and he will act responsibly," Small Smith said. Outside court, National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) spokesperson Tlali Tlali said: "In this particular case an investigation was carried out by the South African Police Service -- as a result of a lack of evidence in this matter, no case has to be answered by Mr Gerhard Nel."

On Wednesday last week, the Democratic Alliance (DA) had said that the arrest of Nel was a witch-hunt to protect police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi. Nel is heading the Scorpions' case against Selebi. "The axing of [suspended NPA head] Vusi Pikoli and now Gerrie Nel has all the appearance of a witch-hunt to protect Selebi," said DA spokesperson on Safety and Security Dianne Kohler Barnard. "The fact that it allegedly took 20 armed policemen to serve the warrant on Nel further reinforces this," she said.

Police spokesperson Superintendent Lungelo Dlamini had said Nel faced five charges including fraud, defeating the ends of justice and perjury. The charges are apparently related to offences allegedly committed between 2004 and 2005.

Meanwhile, Selebi's legal team were on Monday waiting for a date for a hearing for his application to stop an investigation against him after last week's attempt to have it heard urgently failed. "The judge president must provide a date for a full bench," said Selebi's advocate, Jaap Cilliers. Selebi stepped down from his post on Saturday and resigned as head of Interpol on Sunday. On Friday, the Pretoria High Court did not grant Selebi's application to have the matter heard urgently and it was struck off the roll, but the parties will arrange a date for the actual argument. In Selebi's notice of motion, he had wanted to ask for an interdict prohibiting the Scorpions and the Ministry of Justice and Constitutional Development from instituting any criminal prosecution against him, or taking any further steps in any envisaged criminal prosecution. He also wanted a copy of the allegations against him and an opportunity to answer them, to see copies of information justifying warrants of arrest issued against him, and copies of affidavits relating to him.

In court papers, the acting National Director of Public Prosecutions Mokotedi Mpshe said the NPA was ready to charge Selebi with corruption and defeating the course of justice. Alleged corrupt relations with murder accused Glen Agliotti, payments to the amount of R1,2-million and turning a blind eye to drug-smuggling were some of the reasons why they wanted to charge him, the court heard. "The charges against him are based on a strong prima facie case supported by the testimony of a range of witnesses and corroborated by real evidence," Mpshe said.

The NPA said it would meet this week to discuss how to proceed with the case. On Monday, Tlali said the options were either to go ahead with the Selebi matter regardless of Selebi's outstanding application, or to wait for the court to pronounce on Selebi's pending application. The NPA has said it would let Selebi know when it planned to make a move. "He will not be cuffed," said Tlali.

Cilliers said on Monday morning that as far as he knew, Selebi had not yet received notice that he would be wanted in court.

Source: Mail & Guardian

Selebi quits as Interpol chief

Police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi has quit as head of international crime-fighting body Interpol, the organisation said on Sunday.

Source: Mail & Guardian

Armed policemen arrest Scorpions boss

Scorpions boss Gerrie Nel was arrested at his Pretoria home on charges of corruption and defeating the ends of justice on Tuesday night, his attorney Ian Small Smith confirmed on Wednesday. Nel, the regional head of the Directorate of Special Operations, also known as the Scorpions, was arrested by about 20 armed policemen in front of his wife and children at his home at around 9pm on Tuesday. Police spokesperson Superintendent Lungelo Dlamini said Nel faced five charges including fraud, defeating the ends of justice and perjury. He is expected to appear in the Pretoria Magistrate's Court on Friday.

According to the arrest warrant the charges against Nel were corruption and defeating the ends of justice between 2004 and 2005. "The warrant was issued on the 22nd of November 2007 on a case registered in September 2007 for offences allegedly committed between 2004 and 2005," he said. "The police elected to withhold the warrant until the seventh of January before they arrested Advocate Nel under these peculiar, abusive and suspicious circumstances."

Nel's legal team was preparing an urgent application for Nel's release to the Pretoria High Court, "on the basis that the warrant of arrest is malicious and that the police obtained the warrant in bad faith". "His subsequent detention is unlawful and the court would be urged to order his release." Nel led the investigation into the shooting of mining magnate Brett Kebble and led the state's probe into alleged criminal activity by police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi. His arrest comes as pressure mounts on the NPA to disclose their decision on whether or not Selebi had a case to answer.

The NPA on December 16 said it had made the decision following a report received from a panel tasked with reviewing the criminal charges against Selebi. Selebi has come under fire over his involvement with convicted drug trafficker Glenn Agliotti, who is also accused of the murder of mining magnate Brett Kebble. An arrest warrant against Selebi was cancelled in September last year. It was obtained by Nel from the Randburg chief magistrate on September 10, for Selebi's arrest for alleged corruption, fraud, racketeering and defeating the ends of justice. In November last year, it emerged that Nel was the focus of a police investigation headed by one of the Gauteng province's top cops, Commissioner Richard Mdluli.

Acting national director of public prosecutions Mokotedi Mpshe on had held a high level Scorpions meeting in Cape Town where the case against Nel, and the possible reasons behind it, had topped the agenda. Two of the complaints against Nel were made by one of his own investigators, Andrew du Plooy. Du Plooy, who helped to expose allegedly corrupt former members of the unit, Cornwell Tshavhungwa and Geophrey Ledwaba, had opened a docket against Nel and investigator Piet Pieterse at the Silverton police station in Tshwane in 2007.

This was after Du Plooy had reported a complaint against the two men in 2006.

Source: Mail & Guardian