President Jacob Zuma has agreed to release the report of the Donen Commission of Inquiry into South African involvement in the UN “oil-for-food” saga – a document believed to contain potentially damning evidence against top ANC members including Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe and Minister for Human Settlements Tokyo Sexwale.
Zuma’s decision follows an urgent Western Cape High Court application that the Cape Argus, under the banner of Independent Newspapers, lodged in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia) to compel him to release the report.
The UN oil-for-food programme was intended to be a humanitarian mechanism allowing Iraq to sell oil and to use the proceeds strictly for humanitarian relief in the form of food and medicine after the first Gulf War in 1990. However, the programme was significantly abused by the government of Saddam Hussein, which demanded huge kickbacks from companies buying this oil.
In February 2006, the government appointed Cape Town advocate Michael Donen SC to head a one-person commission of inquiry to investigate and advise then president Thabo Mbeki on appropriate action to be taken against any South African company or individual found to have acted illegally in the oil-for-food transactions, and on the adoption of measures to prevent anything similar from happening again.
The Donen Report has been under wraps since November 2006.
Among those named in the report are believed to be controversial businessman and ANC benefactor Sandile Majali, who died in a Joburg hotel late last year, Motlanthe, Sexwale and advocate Sandile Nogxina, the former director-general of the Department of Mineral Resources and now special adviser to the minister of that department, Susan Shabangu.
Sexwale was named in a UN report as being involved through a British company, Mocoh Services, of which he was a director. It was among companies alleged to have paid illegal surcharges for oil. Sexwale, who was not in government at the time, denied any wrongdoing, saying he had not been aware of such payments.
Majali, who had been actively involved in deals involving the oil-for-food programme, was at the centre of South Africa’s “Oilgate” scandal in 2004 when he channelled money from PetroSA into the ANC’s election fund.
According to a report in the Sunday Times, Motlanthe is named in the Donen Report as allegedly being “privy to material information” about Majali’s oil deals, and Nogxina is criticised for allegedly failing to appreciate properly that the government was bound by international law to prevent the payment of surcharges for Iraqi oil.
Soon after the Cape Argus court application was launched, Minister in the Presidency Collins Chabane filed a brief affidavit in which he said the release of the report was not a simple matter.
On Monday, he filed a further affidavit in which he disputed the allegations that Zuma had refused to release the report. He said the president had not refused, but had simply not made a decision.
However, he added that Zuma had decided that public interest required him to rule in favour of the release of the report.
Zuma filed a separate affidavit in which he confirmed that he had decided in the past week “after due deliberation” to release the report by December 7.
The Cape Argus’s Paia request was refused by the Paia deputy information officer in the Presidency, Ken Terry. The newspaper appealed, but Chabane turned it down.
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