Pikoli 'had gut feeling'

2008-07-03 13:16

Johannesburg - Former prosecutions boss Vusi Pikoli had a feeling that the first version of the Browse report would cause trouble but did not do anything about it immediately because he was advised to "file" it and his department already had a heavy workload.

"It was one of those documents that you wish you have never seen. I had this gut feel about this document, that this was going to cause trouble," he said in Johannesburg on Thursday at the Ginwala commission inquiry into his fitness to hold office.

The report was given to him in March/April 2006 by former Directorate of Special Operations head Leonard McCarthy.

McCarthy told him that a Swiss judge had spoken to him about a person involved in money laundering who had made several trips in and out of South Africa. However, McCarthy had said it was still a work in progress.

Busy workload

At the time the DSO was busy with high profile investigations and dealing with matters relating to the Khampepe Commission into the dispute over whether the DSO, an investigative unit, should stay in the Justice Department or be moved to the police.

"We were rather stressed out," he said.

McCarthy said that because he was so busy, there was no harm in just filing it away because he was going to give him a final report. Although it already contained a number of conclusions "on the face of it", Pikoli considered it a "mixture of fact and fiction".

"As I said I did not really apply my mind to it," he said. "I did not study it, I flipped through it."

The report contained allegations of a foreign funded operation to bring ANC president Jacob Zuma to power.

One of the "high profile" investigations that the DSO was working on was a corruption case against Zuma. The other was a corruption case against National Police Commissioner Jackie Selebi.

Apartheid structures of intelligence

When he read the final version in June/July he became angry and thought that "if there was a time that Mr McCarthy was going to leave the DSO, it was going to be that time".

It had clearly been produced by someone who had contact with "old apartheid structures of intelligence", he said, and not a single member of the DSO had the capacity to produce it.

"I told Mr McCarthy that this document shall enjoy no status in the DSO and that there should be no further work on this report."

He believed it was clearly an intelligence report, and not the mandate of the DSO, although it had some elements of organised crime in it.

After that he met the directors general of the National Intelligence Agency and of the SA Secret Service and between them they decided to work together to find out who the source was.

He also discovered they had already independently received some of the information in the report.

'Hot potato'

He said intelligence director general Manala Manzini was not telling the truth when he testified that he had said "I have a hot potato", because he believed the document had no status with the DSO.

Pikoli said he gave the department's full support and co-operation during this investigation, contrary to Manzini's testimony they received none.

He said the only dispute they had with the NIA was over an accusation by them that a DSO person had leaked the report, but, without proof from the NIA, they could not act on it.

Pikoli was suspended on September 23 last year on the grounds of a breakdown in relations with Justice Minister Brigitte Mabandla and that he did not fully appreciate maters of national security.

He believes it is because of the Selebi investigation.

- SAPA