Cape Town, South Africa — Former South African president Jacob Zuma will go on trial for alleged corruption next April, four years after he was formally charged with accepting bribes in connection with a multimillion-dollar arms deal and 20 years after he was first implicated, prosecutors said on Thursday. Thursday.
Zuma is accused of multiple counts of corruption, as well as extortion, fraud, tax evasion and money laundering over a major deal the South African government signed to modernize its armed forces in 1999. Zuma is accused of accepting bribes from the arms company. French Thales, then called Thomson-CSF and subcontractor of the agreement.
The arms deal became one of South Africa’s biggest political scandals and was marred by corruption allegations.
Zuma pleaded not guilty to the charges at a hearing in 2021 that was supposed to mark the start of his trial, but was subject to lengthy delays after Zuma lodged appeals asking that the judge and prosecutor be removed from the case, claiming they were personally biased. against him. The original trial judge recused himself, but Zuma’s attempt to remove the prosecutor was rejected.
Prosecutors said the trial would now begin on April 14 next year, with a pretrial hearing scheduled for August this year. Thales is a co-defendant in the case and has also pleaded not guilty.
“We hope that there are no obstacles that we have to overcome now and that the matter will eventually move forward,” Mthunzi Mhaga, spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority, told South African media. He said Zuma had used “delaying tactics”.
The charges against Zuma relate to a period between 1995 and 2005, before he became president. During that time, he was a rising influential politician and later vice president of South Africa. He is accused of receiving bribes in exchange for giving political protection to the agreement and ensuring that it was carried out despite doubts about it.
Zuma was fired as vice president in 2005 after his financial adviser, who had allegedly arranged the bribes, was convicted of corruption and sentenced to prison.
Zuma was first indicted in 2005, but the charges were dropped and reinstated several times over the years.
Zuma made a dramatic political comeback to become president of South Africa in 2009. He resigned as leader of Africa’s most developed country in 2018 over separate corruption allegations.
If Zuma is convicted of the charges in the arms trafficking trial, he faces a possible sentence of between 15 years and life in prison. The 82-year-old served part of a 15-month prison sentence for contempt of court in 2021 for refusing to testify in a corruption investigation that was unrelated to his trial.
Zuma has since returned to politics, this time as leader of a new political party, and is involved in another court case over whether he is eligible to run as a candidate in this month’s national elections. The national electoral body says he is ineligible because of his criminal contempt conviction.
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