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Delay in arms critic ruling
02/11/2005 12:26 - (SA)
Cape Town - A Cape High Court judge on Wednesday reserved judgment in a bid by Finance Minister Trevor Manuel for the provisional sequestration of arms deal critic Terry Crawford-Browne.
Manuel is seeking to recover almost R1m in legal fees incurred by the state in fighting a series of Crawford-Browne's court challenges to the multi-billion rand deal.
Crawford-Browne, a former banker who at one point lived in the luxury Cape Town suburb of Constantia, maintains he has spent all his money on his arms deal campaign, and that there is no point in sequestrating him.
Counsel for the State, Mahlape Sello, told Judge Roger Cleaver on Wednesday that some of Crawford-Browne's assets might have gone towards the "inexplicable" purchase of a R660 000 house registered in his wife Lavinia's name last year.
Provisional sequestration would allow a trustee to investigate this and to establish whether Crawford-Browne had any bank accounts he had not disclosed.
House bought with inherited money
However Cleaver questioned her repeatedly on whether she had made out the prima facie case required by the Insolvency Act that sequestration would be to the advantage of creditors.
"You can't simply speculate. You've got to have some basis on which you move the application," he said.
Crawford-Browne told Cleaver that his wife, who is Archbishop Desmond Tutu's secretary, bought the house with money inherited from her parents who died in 2002.
The couple are married out of community of property.
He said Manuel's application was an abuse of the court, of himself, and of the people of South Africa.
"It's a matter of vindictiveness," he said.
'He screamed at me'
In an affidavit before the court, he said he had a chance meeting with Manuel in a coffee shop in the Sandton Sun Hotel in 2002, and confronted him over a warplane contract.
"He screamed at me in a public place that he'd 'sue the pants off you. I'll sue the fucking pants off you, and there are witnesses to that'," Crawford-Browne said in the affidavit.
He had asked the court in his papers to consider whether Manuel had committed fraud and perjury in relation to the arms deal, and to award punitive damages of R25m.
However Cleaver said that while he sympathised with the fact that Crawford-Browne had very strongly held and felt views, he was limiting himself to the sequestration application.
- SAPA
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