Bully Downer is not "fascinating".
Billy Downer is a crook and a spy.
Billy Downer is a stinking undead political zombie who has crawled out
from the grave thinking he can get some little advantages by selling
himself again to the anti-liberation-movement reactionaries.
There are no "unanswered questions".
Especially the question "Is Billy Downer a vile, filthy little crook?"
is not unanswered.
It is answered. The answer is: Billy Downer _IS_ a vile, filthy little
crook.
*
**VC*
P. S.: People, you will not be permitted to use this platform for your
anti-liberation-movement propaganda. Not before "Mangaung", and not
after "Mangaung".
VC
On 2012/11/17 08:00 AM, [email protected] wrote:
In a fascinating and strangely under-reported address delivered at an
international law conference a year later, Advocate Billy Downer, who headed
the prosecutions of Shaik and Zuma, hit out at three consecutive heads of the
NPA for the fact that Zuma’s case never came to court.
Downer, a Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions in the Western Cape, was part
of the original Arms Deal team assembled by Ngcuka. He was specifically
responsible for the Thales/Zuma leg of the investigation and worked closely
with Scorpions investigators as part of the unit’s prosecutor-led investigation
style. When Advocate Gerda Ferreira resigned from the Scorpions, Downer took
charge of the entire Arms Deal probe.
In a speech to the Middle Temple conference in October 2010, Downer revealed
that he and his team had been overruled three times, by Ngcuka, Pikoli and
Mpshe.
* * *
In 2003, Ngcuka announced at a public press conference that, although there was
a prima facie case against Zuma, he would not be prosecuted. The case was not
winnable, Ngcuka controversially said. But he made this decision against the
advice of Downer and Ferreira. ‘Mr Ngcuka announced publicly that the
investigating and prosecuting team, of which I was a part, had recommended that
Mr Zuma should be prosecuted. The national director of public prosecutions
[Ngcuka] therefore took an original decision not to prosecute, against the
advice of the two line prosecutors and, indeed, the other members of the
investigating team,’ Downer said.
According to him, Ngcuka’s decision not to prosecute Zuma was constitutionally
significant for three reasons:
1. It was a decision taken by the national head of the NPA, not a Director of
Public Prosecutions responsible for a specific province. Downer said: ‘It is
debatable whether the framers of the Constitution ever intended the NDPP to
have any original powers of decision at all.’
2. Ngcuka disagreed with Downer and Ferreira’s decision that Zuma should be
prosecuted with Shaik: ‘With hindsight, Mr Ngcuka might wish that he had
followed our advice,’ he said. Downer juxtaposed Ngcuka’s decision with the
independence afforded by the Italian prosecution authority to Milan regional
prosecutor Fabio de Pasquale, who had ‘waged a valiant campaign over years
against Prime Minister of Italy Mr Silvio Berlusconi, with some remarkable
successes. Mr de Pasquale has been able to implement his own decisions in the
less hierarchical Italian system.’
3. Ngcuka’s motives were criticised by the political and legal community for
years. Zuma accused Ngcuka of taking a deliberate decision to smear him by
announcing publicly there was a case against him, but not having the guts to
take him to court. This, Downer said, ‘fuelled the debate some years later
about the succeeding NDPPs’ motives for deciding to prosecute Mr Zuma after the
Shaik trial. Mr Ngcuka and the NPA (including me), in all the court papers
where this issue has been raised, have vigorously and in depth denied any
improper motive. Nevertheless, the negative public spin accorded to the Ngcuka
decision not to prosecute, which was said to have poisoned the later decisions
to prosecute Mr Zuma, tended to add some public force to the calls to drop the
Zuma charges entirely, and even to abolish the Scorpions, which agency Mr
Ngcuka famously founded and headed.’
A number of sources inside and outside the ANC told me over the years that
Ngcuka’s decision was abused by Zuma to garner sympathy for his cause – that he
was the victim of a political conspiracy.
Ngcuka, they said, honestly thought he was protecting the ANC and Zuma when he
decided not to prosecute him but rather to go for Shaik. But Zuma needed a
villain for his conspiracy to succeed, I was told, and Ngcuka was the perfect
candidate: the man who told the world there was a prima facie case against him
and briefed newspaper editors about the allegations against Zuma, although he
might have saved him from imprisonment.
* * *
According to Downer, the prosecution of Zuma was a ‘legal inevitability’ after
Judge Squires’ judgment in the Shaik matter. ‘One could not possibly, in the
face of that judgment, do nothing. It was clear as daylight that a prosecution
had to follow. It does not mean that Mr Zuma is guilty, but the judgment just
made it clear that there was such a strong case against him, it would be quite
improper not to prosecute.’
The Scorpions proceeded to search the properties of Zuma, his lawyer and his
associates, and seized more evidence. In his address, Downer reveals that
Pikoli, then the National Director of Public Prosecutions (NDPP), acted against
Downer’s advice that the legal challenges to the raids should be dealt with
first before Zuma’s prosecution started. A number of individuals raided by the
Scorpions, including Zuma himself, his lawyers Michael Hulley and Julekha
Mahomed and businessman Jurgen Kögl, brought legal challenges against the raids
in court. This meant that the state couldn’t use the documents seized in the
raids in its case against Zuma until the courts had declared the raids lawful.
Downer and his team argued that Zuma should not be recharged before these legal
challenges had been dealt with, but was overruled by Pikoli. This meant that
the state had to argue for a postponement of the trial when it came to the
Pietermaritzburg High Court on 20 September 2006. Judge Msimang lashed the
state for not being prepared to proceed and threw out the case.
‘Yet again, the NDPP chose not to follow our advice, this time to delay Mr
Zuma’s prosecution until we had gathered all the new evidence that we had set
about obtaining,’ said Downer.
* * *
After the legal challenges to the raids were finally dealt with by the Supreme
Court of Appeal (SCA) – in the state’s favour – Downer and his team finalised
the draft indictment against Zuma. The SCA delivered its judgment on 8 November
2007. Two months earlier, Mbeki had suspended Pikoli for an alleged ‘breakdown
of trust’ between him and then Justice minister Brigitte Mabandla. In early
December 2007, Downer and his team were ready to move against Zuma. They
recommended to Advocate Mokotedi Mpshe, a deputy NDPP who was acting as head of
the NPA, that they were ready to prosecute Zuma. But this time politics came
into play.
It was a few days before the ANC’s Polokwane conference was due to start, and
Mpshe and his colleagues decided it was a bigger risk to charge Zuma before
than after the Polokwane conference.
Said Downer: ‘Our plea was, as usual, to leave politics out of it and make the
correct prosecution decision. So, once again, the decision to delay the
announcement of the decision until after the Polokwane conference was one taken
against the advice of the line prosecutors.’
The timing of Zuma’s charges became very significant a few months later when
Mpshe released transcripts of conversations between Ngcuka and former Scorpions
boss Leonard McCarthy.
Downer ended his address by posing four questions, which he said remained:
1. Is Zuma guilty?
2. Did the intelligence agencies act irregularly when they released
confidential recordings to Zuma?
3. Did someone in Zuma’s team illegally receive the recordings from the
intelligence agencies?
4. What are the prospects of prosecuting someone in high office in future?
These are valid questions, which cannot stay unanswered forever.
The evidence I have gathered over the years may shed light on some of Downer’s
questions. And more evidence will emerge in future, especially as Zuma loses
popular support. As the Maasai saying goes: truth is like fire – it cannot be
hidden under dry leaves
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