The wrong act cited. The wrong importer named. The wrong agency of state investigating. A total disregard for hard evidence establishing the transaction as duly and legally authorised.
These are just some of the exhaustively documented objections raised by Armscor-accredited weapons dealer Johan Erasmus in seeking an urgent high court order on Tuesday, overturning the impounding of a R15 million consignment of weapons. He brought the weapons into the country in March for demonstration to the SANDF.
With the weapons in police lock-up, Erasmus has not been in a position to put his super high-tech rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) and Gatling mini-guns through their paces ahead of anticipated procurement orders to the value of between R3 billion and R5bn slated for the next three years. This as SA’s near-obsolete infantry capability gears up for the 21st century.
Already postponed three times, Erasmus’ participation in a demonstration scheduled for next week Friday and Saturday at Murrayhill hangs in limbo.
Though the substance of Erasmus’s appeal has yet to be tested, another delay was yesterday granted to respondents who include the Ministers of Police and Justice, as well as the National Conventional Arms Control Committee, an acting Chief Magistrate and the SAPS’s Hawks.
On Tuesday was the third postponement agreed to by the court since Erasmus, as chief executive of weapons importer New Generation Arms Management (NGAM), first challenged the seizure on March 15 this year.
The postponement was for the respondent to file a notice of opposition.
Though the initial seizure of the weapons on March 14 was carried out during a Hawks swoop on the SANDF’s Special Forces bunkering facilities at Walmansthal outside Pretoria without a search warrant being presented – as required by law – a warrant duly discovered among other papers made available to Erasmus’ representatives some days later.
By then Erasmus had already secured an urgent interim order of the North Gauteng (Pretoria) High Court preventing “investigating” authorities from destroying or otherwise disposing of his imported weapons. The warrant in question, however, far from clarifying, merely served to make the matter murkier:
l The warrant cites the Municipal Structures Amendment Act 20 of 2002 and alleged violations thereof for its authority. The act deals with changes to electoral provisions at local level, among other things, and is mute on weapons importation.
l As spelt out in the presumably mis-cited Act 41 of 2002, the National Conventional Arms Control Committee Act (NCACC) – the SAPS has no immediate business investigating arms imports, this being the exclusive preserve of the directorate attached to the NCACC.
l The Hawks action was launched based on an affidavit prepared by a non-commissioned member of Defence Intelligence, but executed without following established protocols and chains of command by a Hawks unit commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Mahlangu.
l Perhaps most damaging of all, the target of the seizure and investigation is given in the warrant as AB Logistics, an entity, which played no greater role in the importation of the weapons than transporting them for a fee from the airport to the Walmansthal bunkering facility.
Questionable though it might have been, in the event the warrant was duly signed off by Johanna Ntshilinga, acting chief magistrate at Wonderboom, dated March 14, ahead of the seizure operation.
As it emerges in exhaustively argued documentation lodged before the North Gauteng High Court, the warrant saga is only one front in a war between the Armscor-accredited NGAM and a shadowy coterie in the SANDF’s Special Forces and procurement agency Armscor.
Especially at stake is control over a clutch of exclusive agency agreements concluded by Erasmus with Bulgarian and US arms manufacturers in respect of southern and South African distribution.
Erasmus has also applied to the court for an interdict against a group of senior Special Forces personnel he claims are seeking to hijack his contracts and the business arising from them.
As things stand, and until 2015, Erasmus holds rights on product from Bulgarian agency ATL Ltd that, in turn, distributes armaments from two leading manufacturers, Arsenal Jsco and VMZ.
The Bulgarian factories – formerly at the cutting edge of Soviet design – are world leaders in affordable portable RPGs of thermobaric capacity.
As regards the US agencies, Erasmus holds exclusive rights to the Dillon Gatling Minigun, a multi-barrelled turret-mounted machine gun capable of firing up to 7 000 rounds a minute.
Both weapons have been identified on SANDF infantry wish-lists as crucial for peace-keeping and anti-piracy operations.
The Star Africa