President Mbeki fired Zuma as the country’s deputy president in 2005, after Zuma’s financial adviser was sentenced to 15 years in jail for trying to elicit bribes from French company Thint, formerly Thomson CSF.
Zuma allegedly accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from Thint to use his influence and stop investigations into arms deal contracts with the government, prosecutors say.
Prosecutors won an important victory on Thursday when the Constitutional Court upheld a ruling that the 2005 police seizure of incriminating documents from Zuma’s home and office was legal. It also ruled that prosecutors could bring documents from Mauritius about a meeting between a Thint executive and Zuma.
The ruling prompted Zuma loyalists to question the Constitutional Court judges’ integrity. Top ANC member Blade Nzimande, who also heads the Communist Party, accused the judges of throwing South Africa into a “constitutional crisis” — comments that led opposition parties to voice concern about the future independence of the judiciary.
“We will accompany Jacob Zuma to court and to the presidency,” Nzimande said. “He will be the next president of the republic of South Africa, irrespective of whatever is happening.”
RSS