The ruckus between the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) over the contentious database containing state capture evidence looks set to drag on.
Answering questions from the Sunday World, Thembi Simelane, the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Development, was non-committal.
“We are working on a system and framework for how the archives will be released. There’s no standoff between the department and the NPA,” Simelane told this paper without elaborating further.
At the heart of the fracas that had pitied Simelane against Shamila Batohi, the national director of public prosecutions, is the NPA’s insistence that the department had sought to block full access to the database evidence.
Zondo commission
This, according to the NPA, hindered it from establishing the investigative directorate dealing with the so-called state capture crimes.
All of the commission’s assets and the crucial evidence presented during the inquiry’s sitting, presided over by Raymond Zondo, the deputy chief justice at the time, are in the legal custody of the Department of Justice.
“The investigating directorate has been provided levels of access but not the access that it needs,” Batohi explained when she appeared before the parliamentary portfolio committee on justice and constitutional development in September.
Shortly after the ANC’s January 8 statement in 2018, then-president Jacob Zuma established the investigation, which later became known as the Zondo commission.
Looting of public purse
It was set up to investigate allegations of widescale looting of the public purse through the allocation of millions of state contracts to well-politically connected individuals.
It was also aimed at probing the public perceptions of fraud in the public sector. The commission came to a hefty cost of R1-billion.
Close to 300 witnesses were hauled before the commission completed its work on June 22. This after Zondo had requested eight times to have the deadline for releasing his findings postponed.
In his findings, Zondo concluded that indeed the state had been captured, singling out the powerful Indian-born Gupta family as the key movers in the state capture project.
He also came hard on Zuma, saying he aided and abetted the plundering of state resources.
He subsequently recommended that those who were fingered in his report be prosecuted.
