DA welcomes Scopa's revisiting of Arms Deal report

The Democratic Alliance (DA) welcomes the fact that the Standing Committee on Public Accounts (SCOPA) today distributed copies of the key material that shows how the Joint Investigation Report into the Arms Deal was altered to absolve senior ANC officials from guilt.

Despite the fact that cast-iron evidence has been available in the public domain for nearly half a decade, showing definitively how the Arms Deal report was whitewashed, Parliament has for a long time refused to confront this matter, so Scopa's decision to review this documentation is to be welcomed, and it constitutes the first necessary step towards the reopening of a proper investigation into the irregularities that occurred.

The reports that were put before Parliament today show how draft versions of the Joint Investigation Report, submitted by the Public Protector, Auditor General and National Director of Public Prosecutions, were substantially altered prior to the formalisation of the final report, which was submitted to Parliament in November 2001. These draft reports were made available via court order, in December 2004, but up until now have never been formally reviewed by a parliamentary committee.

Handwritten notes appear on many of these documents - though their author is unknown, they appear to have been made during a meeting with then senior ANC officials, including former President Mbeki, in which various aspects of the reports that were politically damaging to the ANC appear to have been flagged. These components of the reports were then erased from the final version that was released publicly in 2001.

 [From Part B - Auditor General's report - page 57: An example of an alteration made to the Joint Investigation Report. Here, a section in the report implicating the former Minister of Defence Joe Modise in influencing the tender process for Arms Deal aircraft is removed, and a title which implicated him is altered to read "The visionary approach of the former Minister of Defence". For a summary of all major changes to the Joint Investigation Report, view our summary document.]

A summary of these alterations, including photographs of the handwritten notes made in the draft copies that were obtained via court order, is available for download. These alterations include documentary evidence of how various parties, including ANC ministers, were absolved from any blame, after being implicated in wrongdoing in the draft reports.

It is high time that Parliament takes action against those individuals responsible for the whitewash of the Joint Investigation Report. The fact that these documents have been brought before Scopa in the first place is particularly a testament to the hard work of the previous DA spokesperson on this committee, Eddie Trent MP, and we now need to ensure that the current committee does everything in its power to ensure that justice is done.

Statement issued by Mark Steele, MP, Democratic Alliance spokesperson on public accounts, and David Maynier, MP, DA shadow minister of defence, October 21 2009

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