Mr Bhana

Previous objections were raised by Mr Bhana's legal team that certain lines of questioning fall outside the mandate of the Commission, reserving client rights to address those issues at appropriate times.

“previously when we have appeared in front of the Commission, we raised an objection to example for a certain line of questioning that our learned friend was putting to the witness... that the line of questioning fell outside the mandate of the Commission and that we reserved our client’s rights to place that an issue at the appropriate time”

The evidence leader has prepared hundreds of pages of spreadsheets and detailed analysis related to evidence, which Mr Bhana expected to deal with in relation to Mr Suleiman's evidence; defence counsel seeks more time to respond to this volume of evidence.

“I am holding it up. It is a file full of hundreds of pages of spreadsheets and detailed analysis that had been done. So we expected to have been sitting here dealing with Mr Suleiman's evidence yesterday, and I said to you, on the roof, expected to go through all of this.”

Mr Bhana stated the hundreds of pages of evidence documents included numerous transactions and that they did not yet have an adequate or fair opportunity to deal with this evidence.

“The documents look like this, intense line items of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of transactions. Now, it might be that the Commissions say it is not intending to refer to all of those transactions, but we have simply not had an adequate or fair opportunity to deal with this.”

Mr Bhana made a formal application for a stand-down to prepare an application for postponement because of the volume and late disclosure of evidence documents.

“I want to deal with all of this formally in an application, and I would like to stand down to bring that application.”

Mr Bhana clarified that the defence does not intend to refer to the hundreds of pages of spreadsheets in cross-examination but only an infographic summary and line item spreadsheet already given to Mr Carrim's team.

“We will not refer to a single one of those pages. We have made that clear to Mr Carrim's team.... What we sent them electronically ... is really the only sensible ...”