Arms deal commission delays a concern
The Congress of South African Trade Unions is seriously concerned at the costly length of time it is taking for the arms deal commission of inquiry to get down to its important and necessary work of investigating the deal.
The commission was supposed to begin its public hearings in Pretoria today, 5 August 2013, nearly two years after the President announced the setting up of the commission, but it has been adjourned for two weeks, at the request of lawyers for the defence department so that documents can be declassified.
This is necessary to enable them to be presented to the commission, without the commission having to ask members of the public to leave the venue "every 15 minutes" when classified information needed to be discussed, according to commission spokesperson William Baloyi.
But why could these documents not have been declassified before the commission convened? Yet another delay could result from the resignation of one of the commissioners, Judge Francis Legodi, last week, which means that the commission may be inquorate, until a new commissioner has been appointed.
The arms deal was initially estimated to cost R43m, and is believed to have escalated to as much as R70 billion. COSATU`s 9th National Congress in 2006 reaffirmed "the decisions of the Central Committee of COSATU to call for a full and impartial investigation into the arms deal".
In September 2011 the federation therefore welcomed the President's announcements and said that "an investigation into the arms deal is crucial in demonstrating government's campaign against corruption. The full facts about the arms deal must be exposed to the people of South Africa and the world... Public representatives who betray citizens' trust and utilize state resources to line their pockets must be brought to book".
COSATU is disappointed by the decision of UK regulator, the Financial Reporting Council, to abandon its two-year-old investigation into the arms deal. The council, which conducts independent investigations of the behaviour of UK auditing and accounting firms, says it is dropping the case as the investigation was no longer in the public interest.
The federation disagrees strongly. Abandoning the British probe will leave a lot of unanswered questions. In 2010 one British company, BAE Systems, has already ‘settled' a £286m fine levied on it by the UK's Fraud Office for failing to comply with global anti-bribery rules.
Corruption permeates throughout society; however the media often create the false impression that it is mainly found in the public sector, and do not focus enough on the private sector, where corruption has its roots.
That is why the exposure of all the massive private sector corruption scandals, such as the arms deal, as well as price fixing scandals in the milk, cement and bread sectors and the contract collusion in the construction industry are so necessary.
No stone must be left unturned to expose the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the arms deal. The innocent must be exonerated and the guilty punished, for enriching themselves at the expense of the people who put their trust in them.
Statement issued by Patrick Craven, COSATU national spokesperson, August 6 2013
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