After a year during which his public appearances have been marked by tears and various degrees of contrition, Hansie Cronje betrayed anger for the first time on Tuesday at a press conference in which he claimed to have answered all outstanding queries about his financial affairs, satisfied the conditions of his indemnity against criminal prosecution and threatened to institute legal action against those who leaked and published an incomplete forensic audit into his affairs.

On Wednesday Cronje's legal team will meet Bulelani Ngcuka in an attempt to convince the South African Director of Public Prosecutions that he has met the terms of the indemnity deal struck before last year King commission hearings. Cronje's case will be based on a 13-page document which, he says, provides explanations for some 120 transactions queried by forensic auditors Deloitte Touche.

He will also argue that details of some 19 bank accounts and eight properties, three of which he still owns, were provided by him to officials of the King commission before and during last June's hearings.

All of this was made public on Tuesday in response to a Sunday Telegraph report, written by Neil Manthorp, in which details of what can only be described as a provisional forensic audit were listed.

Cronje, it has to be said, was extremely plausible at his press conference. He was also clearly angry. "I'm sorry I've had a go at you," he apologised to the journalists, "but I'm cross."

He denied ever having obstructed the auditors in their inquiry and instead criticised both Deloitte Touche and the King commission for wasting millions of rands.

Cronje claimed that the audit report, dated November 5 last year, had only been received at the offices of his lawyer Leslie Sackstein on February 3, a Saturday. He said he had seen the report for the first time on February 5. On February 9 Justice Edwin King closed his commission down.

According to Cronje, the only contact the auditors had with himself or his legal advisers was to set up a meeting on December 21. He said that the auditors cancelled the meeting on the evening of December 20.

A figure of R10,5-million was mentioned in the Sunday Telegraph as the total amount of deposits made into his various accounts. Cronje has clearly spent a great deal of time working through these deposits. Some, he said, were salary desposits made by the United Cricket Board and, before that, the Free State Cricket Union. He produced a document from Ian Smith, the then Director of Finance at the UCB, which confirmed Cronje's salary payments.

The mysterious "Magda", who was featured in the Sunday Telegraph story as making a number of deposits, is identified as a woman who then worked for Clifford Green, the UCB's legal adviser. Green also acted as Cronje's agent for some time.

Other deposits, said Cronje, simply reflected inter-account transfers as he moved money from one account to a higher interest-bearing accounts.

For all bar two transactions Cronje had an explanation. According to Sackstein, these gaps existed because Cronje's banks had not yet been able to track down the transactions in their archives.

Most particularly, though, Cronje reserved his wrath for Neil Manthorp, the author of the Sunday Telegraph article. Sackstein said he intended to lay charges under the South African Commissions Act against Manthorp and the unnamed officials who provided a copy of the audit report. The maximum penalty for disclosing and publishing commission documents without permission, said Sacktstein, is a six-month jail sentence.

Cronje suggested on Tuesday that Manthorp had launched a personal campaign against him as a result of an argument between the two during South Africa's tour of Australia in 1998. In fairness to Manthorp, his story as published on Sunday, makes no mention of "secret" accounts and "undisclosed" dealings. These were written into the story in woefully inept interpretations of the original in South Africa's Monday morning papers.

For all Cronje's bullishness, however, he did not touch upon any dealings involving a NatWest account held by him. In their report, the auditors say: "For example, the NatWest account bank statements would help us identify foreign earnings as mentioned by Mr Cronje in his statement of 15 June 2000 that his NaWest account was used for `my foreign earnings'."

Cronje, who attend his grandmother's funeral on Tuesday afternoon, could not be contacted in the evening for clarification.

And also on Tuesday evening, Sipho Ngwema, a spokesman for the South African DPP, continued to insist that Cronje had not been given an assurance of indemnity at the King commission. He said that the meeting between the DPP and Cronje's lawyers on Wednesday was to allow the Cronje team to "make representations".

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