International Relations and Co-operation Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane has admitted that SA’s representative on the International Atomic Energy Agency was instructed by the government to take a stance in a key nuclear proliferation vote that benefited ANC-connected cellphone giant MTN in its commercial dealings with the government of nuclear pariah Iran.
The vote, under scrutiny in a written parliamentary question by DA spokesman on defence David Maynier, was one in early 2005 in which a decision was to be taken in the IAEA on whether to refer the issue of Iran’s refusal to allow UN inspectors access to its controversial nuclear programme to the UN’s Security Council for further action.
Referring the matter to the Security Council would almost certainly have led to an intensification of trade sanctions, arms embargoes and other punitive measures against the recalcitrant Iranians.
For their part, as emerged in papers before a court in Washington DC, the Iranians had made it a pre-condition for entering into a $31.6bn cellular contract with MTN that SA use its influential IAEA vote against UN sanctions on Iran.
This emerged in papers lodged by Turkish cellular operator Turkcell in a legal application before a court in Washington DC. On the basis of testimony and documentation by a former senior executive of MTN’s Iran operation, Turkcell showed Iranians had demanded the SA UN vote in exchange for signing the cellphone contract.
In the midst of this negotiation – between September 2005 and February 2006 – SA’s political representative on the IAEA, Abdul Minty, is on record as having done a dramatic about-turn on the issue of Iranian nuclear aspirations. While SA had formerly voted with Europe and the Americas to curb Iran’s nuclear programme, in September and November 2005, and in February 2006, Minty broke ranks with the international community, first voting against sanctions, then abstaining from a vote to refer the Iranian nuclear matter to the UN Security Council.
Later in 2006, after the MTN licence was signed and sealed, SA again reverted to its default position, supporting curbs on Iranian nuclear ambitions.
But it was not up to Minty, according to Nkoana-Mashabane in Parliament last week.
“South African officials representing the country at meetings of international organisations receive instructions as to how they should vote on specific issues,” she said in her reply. “[They] cannot make such decisions on their own without prior consultation with [the department].”
As the sequence of events is narrated in the Turkcell court application, Minty was originally approached to discuss the UN issue on a visit to Iran in 2004, when he met MTN executives in an exchange organised by SA’s ambassador to Iran, Yusuf Saloojee. In a subsequent IAEA resolution – in August 2004 – SA continued to oppose the Iranian nuclear programme. It was only after an informal meeting between Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani and then president Thabo Mbeki in SA, brokered by Saloojee with the trip MTN-sponsored, that Minty – according to Nkoana Mashabane – was apparently instructed to change his mind.
Three days after a November 2005 meeting of the IAEA where SA took the side of Iran, MTN’s $36bn contract was signed off after a protracted period in negotiations limbo. It was finally ratified in February 2006, after SA abstained from a crucial vote to refer the issue to the UN Security Council.
In his question to Nkoana Mashabane, Maynier asked if the department was investigating bribery and trading in influence linked to Minty.
The minister indicated no such investigations were in progress. But circumstances were different in relation to Saloojee, suspended pending investigations into an alleged R1.6m pay-off. MTN has denied the allegations and is resisting Turkcell’s attempts to have the matter reviewed in a US court.
Commenting on the parliamentary reply, Maynier said: “The minister is correct to point out the allegations against ambassador Abdul Minty are of a very different order of magnitude from the allegations against Ambassador Yusuf Saloojee. This does not mean the allegations should not be investigated.”
Questions to International Relations and Co-operation Department spokesman Clayson Monyela regarding the departmental investigation into the MTN/Iran saga remained unanswered at the time of going to press.
Weekend Argus