President Thabo Mbeki is no longer under investigation of any alleged corruption involving South Africa's controversial arms deal with Germany.

The Düsseldorf public prosecutor's office this week permanently ended its investigations into the multibillion-rand sale of four corvettes to the South African Navy.

Senior ANC members were alleged to have received huge kickbacks for the deal.

The decision to close the case comes after South Africa failed to provide German authorities with any of the information they had requested to finalise their case.

"We needed to find where the money might have gone … and we were unable to do so," Arno Neukirchen of the Düsseldorf public prosecutor's office said yesterday.

"This investigation has been going on for a long time and we did not believe we had a good chance of securing convictions."

Neukirchen has led the prosecuting team investigating whether former employees of giant steel and arms manufacturing group Thyssen-Krupp, among others, were guilty of "criminally relevant behaviour" in connection with the corvette sales in the late 1990s.

Presidential spokesman Mukoni Ratshitanga's only comment was to point out that Mbeki had called on anyone with evidence against him to come forward.

ThyssenKrupp said that "criminally relevant behaviour, in particular acts of bribery, were not established by the public prosecutor's office".

With acknowledgements to Cape Argus.