South Africa launched one of its biggest post-apartheid corruption cases yesterday, opening a trial that could affect Deputy President Jacob Zuma’s hopes for the country’s top job. Zuma’s former financial adviser and associate Schabir Shaik faces charges of corruption and bribery linked to arms deals worth billions of dollars.

The deputy president’s name appears repeatedly in the charge sheet against Shaik, who the prosecution says paid him some 1.3 million rand ($196,000 at current rates) in bribes between 1995 and 2002. The public prosecutor has said there is a “prima facie” case against Zuma, but decided not to charge him as the chances of securing a conviction were too low.

Zuma, 62, long expected to take over from President Thabo Mbeki in 2009, dismisses the accusations against him as “baseless and untruthful”. His political allies have termed the trial an attempt by his opponents to deny him a shot at becoming president. Shaik is also accused of involvement in soliciting a bribe from a French arms company in return for protection from a probe into alleged irregularities in the weapons supply contract.

Shaik has denied any wrongdoing, saying his close relationship to Zuma was simply a reflection of their shared history in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. The Durban High Court accepted a prosecution application yesterday to withdraw charges against arms firm Thint (Pty) Ltd., a South African subsidiary of French aerospace conglomerate Thales, formerly called Thomson-CSF.

“The withdrawal was part of the strategy towards the ultimate end,” Sipho Ngwema, spokesman for the public prosecutor, told reporters outside the High Court in the Indian Ocean port of Durban. Some analysts have said a conviction against Shaik could clear the way for charges against Zuma, but Ngwema said that although the case would be reviewed as it progressed, there were no plans to involve Zuma either as witness or defendant.

“At this stage as things stand the only accused in the matter are on the indictment,” Ngwema said. The case has gripped South African media and newspapers have reported the indictment in minute detail in the run-up to a trial that could make or break the future of one of the country’s most popular politicians. “The trial ... could be said to be very much about who the country’s next president will be,” Johannesburg’s Star said on Sunday. Private television station e.tv has applied for the ban on cameras in courtrooms to be lifted so it can televise the case. The court’s deliberations yesterday and today are likely to focus on that application, with the hearing on the criminal charges only getting under way tomorrow.

<B>Andrew Quinn</B>