By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Former president Jacob Zuma has lost his application in the Pietermaritzburg High Court for State advocate Billy Downer SC to be removed as prosecutor from his arms deal corruption trial.
Delivering the judgment on Wednesday morning, Judge Nkosinathi Chili said the former president had failed to show that Downer’s presence as his prosecutor would violate his right to a fair trial.
“I am not persuaded that Zuma succeeded in establishing that the retention of Downer as the prosecutor in this matter could prejudice his right to a fair trial enshrined in Section 35 of Subsection 3 of the Constitution.
“I therefore make the following order: The application for the removal of Downer as the public prosecutor in the criminal prosecution of Zuma and Thales South Africa (Pty) Ltd is dismissed. Reasons shall be incorporated in my judgment,” Judge Chili said.
The judge said he would only provide the reasons for his judgment “at the end of the trial”, after Zuma’s lawyer, Dali Mpofu, had requested them “to trigger any further proceedings”.
The former president was not present in court on Wednesday morning.
Mpofu said he was with Zuma at the Electoral Court in Bloemfontein where he received instructions from the former president to appeal the ruling.
At the conclusion of Wednesday’s proceedings, Judge Chili postponed the matter to 17 May for a pretrial conference.
Zuma was charged in 2021 with multiple counts of corruption over a multibillion-dollar arms deal that South Africa signed in 1999 with French company Thales, then known as Thomson-CSF. He is accused of taking hundreds of bribes to help Thales get the deal and faces at least 15 years in jail.
He is alleged to have taken the bribes while he was a political figure on the rise in the late 1990s and 2000s, although before he became president in 2009.
Zuma was first implicated 20 years ago but charges against him were dropped and reinstated numerous times amid allegations of political interference. His corruption trial officially began nearly two years ago but no evidence has yet been heard as Zuma has launched a series of legal challenges.