Corruption allegations against senior members of the African National Congress (ANC) returned to the fore when their attempt to smear their chief accuser as a spy of the apartheid regime collapsed on Tuesday.
A judicial inquiry found no reason to believe that Bulelani Nguka, the chief prosecutor, was a secret agent for the minority white regime.
After five months of hearings and deliberations which riveted the country, the retired judge Joos Hefer cleared Nguka and threw the spotlight back on ANC members accused of corruption.
"Allegations of spying have not been established. The allegations were ill-conceived and entirely unsubstantiated," he said in his final report.
The inquiry has tarnished leading figures of the liberation struggle and damaged the chances of the deputy president, Jacob Zuma, succeeding President Thabo Mbeki.
ANC supporters were left baffled and uneasy by a tangled saga which showed party factions fighting one another for power before the general election expected in March or April.
A whispering campaign against Nguka, who heads the Scorpions, an elite investigations unit modelled on the FBI, came to a head last August in a newspaper article which claimed that he spied for the apartheid regime before the transition to democracy in 1994.
It claimed that as a jailed black anti-apartheid activist he bought his freedom by betraying his colleagues in the early 1990s as a police agent codenamed RS452.
Mbeki appointed a judicial commission to probe the allegation, which Nguka denied.
During hearings in Bloemfontein it emerged that the sources for the article were Mac Maharaj, a former transport minister who served time on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, and Mo Shaik, a foreign ministry adviser.
Their claim hinged on an investigation by the ANC in 1989, led by Shaik, which concluded that Nguka might have been a spy.
Agent RS452 turned out to be Vanessa Brereton, a white lawyer now living in London, who came forward to declare the fact during the commission hearings.
Heffer dismissed the evidence against Nguka as "the unfortunate result of ill-founded inferences and groundless assumptions."
Attention will now turn to his accusers, who are suspected of trying to derail a Scorpions' investigation into their finances. Maharaj has been questioned about payments from Schabir Shaik, brother of Mo, into his wife's bank account.
Schabir Shaik is also the self-styled financial adviser to the deputy president, Zuma, who was investigated by the Scorpions for allegedly soliciting a bribe from a French company involved in a controversial arms deal.
Nguka unleashed a political tempest by publicly declaring that there was evidence for a prima facie case against Zuma but that no charges would be laid. Shortly afterwards the spy claim story surfaced in City Press, a Johannesburg weekly.
The deputy president, popular with the ANC's rank and file and its trade union allies, was emerging as a potential successor to Mbeki, but his chances are now likely to dim.
Hefer criticized Zuma for threatening to ignore a subpoena to testify before the commission on the grounds that he had no right to discuss such matters outside the ANC.
"It would be a sad day if, for fear of incurring the wrath of a political organization to which he belongs, the holder of one of the highest offices of state were to consider ignoring a subpoena issued by a commission appointed by the president under a power vested in him by the constitution," the report says.
Some commentators said the report suited Mbeki as a means of neutralizing a potential rival and punishing foes such as Maharaj.
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