NPA challenges Zuma and Thales's tactics in arms deal corruption case

The National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) has pleaded with the Pietermaritzburg High Court to reject former president Jacob Zuma's and the French arms manufacturer Thales's repeated appeal against rulings, as it said this amounts to infinite Stalingrad tactics against the arms deal trial. 

Zuma and Thales appeared at the Pietermaritzburg High Court on Tuesday to apply for leave to appeal Judge Nkosinathi Chilli’s ruling in June that the trial on the alleged multibillion-rand arms deal corruption should proceed.

The issue of continuous appeals and applications for leave to appeal has caused frustration in bringing the matter to finality to such an extent that even Judge Chili had expressed concern that whatever decision he makes on the current application would be followed by another appeal. 

To avoid further delay in taking the matter to trial, Chili urged the defence and State teams not to go into the merits of the application. 

“Is it really in the interest of justice to enter into the merits of this application? The reason is that what is going to follow is that the court will write a judgment, and once the court writes a judgment, the unsuccessful party (State or defence) is most definitely going to take the court decision on appeal, causing a further delay in the finalisation of this matter,”  said Chili.

He did not blame any party for the delay. 

NPA’s Advocate Wim Trengrove said soon after the matter was brought to court, the State should not allow Zuma and Thales to launch a series of appeals, but should have insisted that the trial go on trial despite pending appeals. 

Zuma and Thales want to appeal Chili’s ruling against their application for a stay of prosecution against them, as they argued that the trial would be constitutionally unfair against them. 

Zuma is supporting Thales’s argument that two witnesses, Pierre Moynot and Alain Thetard, who were set to testify in its favour, died in 2020 and 2022, respectively. 

Moynot and Thetard were the directors of Thales when the alleged arms deal scandal was committed. 

Thales had also argued that even crucial documented evidence was no longer available due to the delay of the trial.

Zuma’s legal team, led by Advocate Dali Mpofu, had previously argued that there would be no point in putting Zuma on trial when Thales, who was the corrupter, had been acquitted. 

Trengrove said the matter should go on trial and that the accused should only be allowed to appeal after the conviction. 

Trengrove accused the two of having played a delaying tactic for 18 years to avoid answering the charges against them.

He said there was no indication that the delays would end, and that the accused would ever cooperate in taking the matter to trial, as they were consistently launching “hopeless applications”. 

“Mr Zuma has, over the years, run eight different interrogatory applications (of which) Thales has been part of four of them. 

“What these applications have in common is that they have all been dismissed, and they have all been taken on appeal or on application for leave to appeal to the final limit.

“None of them has stopped short of the limit that the law permits,” said Trengrove.

He said another “important” feature of the delays was that the appeals were consecutively run to avoid being disposed of at the same time. 

“So that if one application finally ends, another is launched, and so we go on the merry-go-round to avoid the trial,” he said.

Trengrove said the delays have prejudiced the administration of justice by creating an impression that it was incapable of bringing the matter to trial. 

Although he said legally, the accused could not be stopped from bringing delaying applications, he called on the court to find a way to do away with a conundrum caused by Zuma and Thales’s Stalingrad tactics.

Trengrove said the court papers show a long history of “application after application after application”, which had all failed and been dismissed on appeal. 

Mpofu argued that it was pointless to prosecute because Thetard, who was the author of the encrypted fax, which is key to the case, is dead, and going to the trial without his oral evidence was an irredeemable mistake. 

“Whether it is today, yesterday, 10 years, Mr Thetard would be dead, and he is not going to be more dead when the trial starts.

“And we cannot cross-examine the man who is six feet under the ground,” said Mpofu.

He said no one could contest that Thatard was a key witness. 

“If you walk around in the street and ask anybody, ‘What is Mr Zuma in court for?’, they are going to say it is an arms deal case. What about the arms deal? Encrypted fax. 

“People who do not know the case as we do know those two things.

“The author of the encrypted fax, which is the smoking gun, is dead and if the person who wrote the fax says in an affidavit (which is before the court) ‘this fax is being misinterpreted’ and he says ‘it is not true that in this fax I was soliciting a bribe for Mr Zuma and that is the statement he takes to the grave,” said Mpofu. 

Judge Chili will deliver the ruling on Zuma and Thales's application for leave to appeal on January 23, 2026.

bongani.hans@inl.co.za