Zuma in new legal wrangle over Thuli report
|Published
President Jacob Zuma File photo: Mike Hutchings/Reuters President Jacob Zuma File photo: Mike Hutchings/Reuters
Pretoria - President Jacob Zuma’s legal woes continue to mount - the official opposition says will lay criminal charges against him over state capture today (Tuesday).
But he himself has filed papers asking the court to absolve him from personally paying the costs for his recent abortive attempt to interdict the release of the public protector’s State of Capture report. He wants taxpayers to pay his legal fees.
And Zuma on Monday shed more light on what he planned to do with the State of Capture report.
After he refused to answer any of the 10 written questions by DA MPs in Parliament on the report, Zuma said he was going to court to challenge it. He said the report was inconclusive and he was taking it on review.
DA leader Mmusi Maimane said they would lay criminal charges against Zuma because they believed he had a case to answer on state capture.
In his heads of argument filed at the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, Zuma was adamant that taxpayers - and not him - should foot the bill for his aborted application to try and gag the controversial report.
Zuma said he brought the application as president of the country and not in his personal capacity. A full bench (three judges) two weeks ago ordered him to give reasons as to why he should not foot the legal bill personally.
The DA, Cope, the EFF and UDM vehemently objected to the fact that the president used the State Attorney’s office as his lawyers in bringing his application.
The State Attorney handles litigation on behalf of the government and thus the legal bill gets paid from the public purse.
The court earlier slapped the Zuma camp with the legal fees on a punitive scale for the entire State of Capture court proceedings. According to a senior advocate close to the case, the legal bill for the entire application could run to R3 million.
When he withdrew his application on the second day of the proceedings, Zuma in fact offered to foot the bill from the public purse.
Counsel for the various parties objected to the taxpayer footing the bill and said it should come out of Zuma’s own pocket.
They said the report dealt with allegations of a personal relationship between the Guptas and Zuma, which had nothing to do with his position as president of the country. They said there was no basis in law or fact to saddle the taxpayer with the costs incurred in the application. They said Zuma should have used a private lawyer, paid by him, as this was a private matter.
Pretoria News