It has been a year since the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey-listed South Africa. At the time, many predictions were made about the impact that greylisting would have on the country.
Today, Moonstone releases an interview with Sangeeth Sewnath, deputy managing director of Ninety One, about the extent to which greylisting is affecting the economy, the capital markets, and retail investors. Have we seen the worst of the fall-out, or is there more pain to come?
Most importantly, is the country making progress with achieving the FATF’s action plan to get off the grey list in 2025?
Click below to view the full video on Greylisting 2024.
Sewnath was one of the high-profile people featured in “Greylisting”, the documentary Moonstone released last year that explains why South Africa was grey-listed.
National Treasury’s deputy director-general, Ismail Momoniat, said yesterday that South Africa should get off the grey list by the scheduled date of June 2025. This is according to a report by Business Day.
Momoniat attended the FATF’s plenary in Paris from 21 to 23 February.
He said South Africa has completed 5 of the 22 action items required to get off the list and has made good progress on 15 of the remaining 17.
“While it is going to be tough, we should be able to make good progress this year to get out of greylisting by June 2025, which is the scheduled date,” Business Day quoted Momoniat as saying. “Bear in mind, we had a lot to cover, as our key law enforcement institutions were crippled due to state capture.”
The FATF’s status report on “jurisdictions under increased monitoring” said South Africa has taken steps towards improving its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CFT) regime.
The report, dated 24 February, said these steps include addressing technical deficiencies in its targeted financial sanctions regime related to terrorism financing, increasing the use of intelligence from the Financial Intelligence Centre to support investigations, and increasing the resources of AML/CFT supervisors.
The FATF said South Africa should continue to work on implementing its action plan to address its strategic deficiencies, including by:
- Demonstrating a sustained increase in the number of requests for assistance from other jurisdictions to facilitate investigations and the confiscation of assets.
- Improving the risk-based supervision of designated non-financial businesses and professions and demonstrating that all AML/CFT supervisors apply effective, proportionate, and effective sanctions for non-compliance.
- Ensuring that the authorities have timely access to accurate and up-to-date beneficial ownership information and sanction by entities that do not adhere to their beneficial ownership obligations.
- Demonstrating a sustained increase in investigations and prosecutions of serious and complex cases of money laundering, as well as terrorist-financing activities.
- Enhancing its identification, seizure, and confiscation of the proceeds of a wider range of crimes associated with money laundering.
- Updating its terrorist financing risk assessment to inform the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to counter the financing of terrorism.
- Ensuring the effective implementation of targeted financial sanctions.
The FATF plenary congratulated Barbados, Gibraltar, Uganda, and the United Arab Emirates for being removed from the grey list after making significant progress in addressing the strategic AML/CFT deficiencies previously identified during their mutual evaluations.
The FATF added Kenya and Namibia to the grey list.