Cape Town - Western Cape Premier Helen Zille’s spokesperson, Michael Mpofu, now says the DA provincial government suspected phones of its MECs and Zille had been bugged by the official State Security Agency (SSA).
This was among the reasons Zille’s department decided to use public money to pay for the services of senior police crime intelligence officer Paul Scheepers, in his personal capacity, whose private company was hired in May 2010 to “debug” cellphones in her department, said Mpofu.
Asked if this was legal, SSA spokesperson Brian Dube said: “In terms of the National Strategic Intelligence Act, national and provincial government structures can request various services from the SSA and these are then dealt with and provided accordingly.
“Use of private companies for provision of intelligence services is clearly illegal.”
The ANC now wants Zille criminally investigated for her government’s use of Scheepers and whether his services went beyond “debugging” cellphones to spying on the opposition and members of the DA.
But Mpofu said: “Cabinet (the provincial executive committee headed by Zille) had strong reason to believe that they were under surveillance by elements within the National Intelligence Agency (NIA).
“Cabinet then took a resolution to acquire software to prevent the bugging of their phones, after failing to receive written reassurances from the NIA.”
Mpofu said using the state to provide “debugging” services to the provincial government would have defeated the purpose.
He reiterated that Zille had no hand in awarding the tender, worth R115 800, to Scheepers’s company, Eagle Eye Solution Technologies.
Mpofu said the use of Scheepers’s services in 2010 by the provincial government had no relation to Scheepers’s claims in an affidavit that he had been raided because he had received information months earlier from his informants that a senior police officer in the Western Cape regularly met high-profile gang bosses and drug dealers.
Yet these were the same claims that Zille highlighted almost three weeks ago in her weekly newsletter, in which she called for increased police resources to fight crime in the Western Cape.
Scheepers is set to return to the Bellville Commercial Crimes Court on Monday to face charges of fraud, perjury and contravening the Electronic Communications Act, related to a raid in which the police’s anti-corruption unit had seized several items.
He was arrested in May and released on R20 000 bail.
On November 20, Scheepers will be back in the Western Cape High Court, where he is fighting the SAPS to have the equipment, confiscated from him, returned.
Institute of Security Studies senior researcher Johan Burger said the Western Cape government’s decision to hire a private contractor had to be viewed in the context of the chequered history of the NIA, the SSA’s predecessor.
“Look at crime intelligence and at the problems there and people like Richard Mdluli, who has been on suspension for more than two years.
“There’s been all these allegations of use of the (SAPS) crime intelligence division for political reasons and Mdluli’s name figures very prominently in that,” said Burger.
@mtyala
Cape Times
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