Arms deal inquiry cost R137m

Johannesburg - The inquiry into the 1999 arms deal cost R137 million, or less than 1 percent of the loan repayments while the inquiry ran. More than half of the inquiry’s cost was paying the 10 evidence leaders.

This is what Justice Minister Michael Masutha told Parliament in reply to a question from the DA. The Arms Procurement Commission was set up in 2011, started work the next year and submitted its final report to the president last month.

Over the four years, the commission cost R137.265m, said Masutha. This included R82.839m to pay the 10 evidence leaders. The highest single year’s payment to an evidence leader was R6.1m for a year’s work in 2013/14, and the highest total payment to an evidence leader for all four years’ work was R13m to the same lawyer.

Another R30.35m was spent on staff over four years, plus R9.8m on a forensic auditor. Travel costs totalled R7.3m over four years, leasing photocopiers
R162 000, transcriptions came to R624 000 and vehicle licensing R129 000. The minister’s reply includes a table which multiplies all those figures by 1 000, which would give a total cost of the commission of R137 billion; this appears to be an error.

In the commission’s final report, it said the original price of the deal in 1999 was R29.992bn; the total cash outlay from 2000/1 to 2013/14 was R46.666bn. The difference was mainly due to inflation-related contract price adjustments and the deprecation of the rand.

The National Treasury records on state debt indicate that in the four years of the commission’s life, payments totalling R14.7bn were made on the arms deal loans. Thus the cost of the inquiry was about 0.5 percent of the price of the deal, or about 0.9 percent of the amount spent on loan repayments.