Durban - Durban businessman Schabir Shaik will know on Friday whether he will be granted an opportunity to appeal against his fraud and corruption conviction and 15-year jail sentence.

High Court Judge Hilary Squires is to hand down judgment at 10:00 following Shaik's application for leave to appeal against his convictions, all of which involved financial dealings with former deputy president Jacob Zuma.

Should the application be turned down, Shaik would have to decide whether to go straight to jail or exercise the option of petitioning the chief justice for leave to challenge his conviction in the Supreme Court of Appeal in Bloemfontein.

On Wednesday, his lawyer Reeves Parsee said Shaik had not yet indicated his preference.

Shaik is out on R100 000 bail.

"A generally corrupt relationship"

On Tuesday, Shaik's legal team argued that friendship and camaraderie, not self-interest, were behind payments he had made to Zuma.

Defence advocate Francois van Zyl, SC, argued that the men had an enduring friendship which was forged during the anti-apartheid struggle.

Following Shaik's conviction in June, Zuma was relieved of his duties and is to go on trial on related charges later this year.

The first corruption charge entailed a "generally corrupt relationship" between the two men and payments to Zuma to the tune of more than R1.2m.

But Shaik contended his Nkobi group of companies never got any government contract or tender as a result of the payments, and denied they were made to persuade Zuma into committing or omitting any act in his favour.

On count two, the fraud charge, Van Zyl argued Squires erred in rejecting Shaik's evidence that he had been unaware of the irregular writing off of loan accounts on the books of his Nkobi groups of companies. Some of this money went to Zuma.

The second corruption charge deals with Shaik's alleged attempts to secure a bribe of R500 000 a year for Zuma from French arms company Thomson-CSF in return for protection from a probe into South Africa's multi-billion rand arms deal.

Contesting Shaik's sentence

On this count, Van Zyl said the court should not have allowed as evidence an encrypted fax allegedly detailing a meeting to organise the deal.

He also argued that the sentence imposed on Shaik was "shockingly inappropriate".

Shaik was sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment on each of the corruption charges and three years for fraud. But Squires ordered the three penalties to run concurrently.

In counter-argument, the State said there was no reasonable prospect of another court coming to a different conclusion on Squires' analysis of the evidence.

Leave to appeal should not be granted merely because a matter was controversial or had elicited uninformed public criticism, argued prosecutor Billy Downer.

Squires is to give judgment in Shaik's application at 10:00 on Friday.

With acknowledgements to Sapa and News24.