Members of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Finance (Scof) declined to process the omnibus anti-grey-listing bill on Tuesday evening, taking exception to what they viewed as an attempt to ride roughshod over parliamentary procedure.
Scof was due to consider and adopt its report on the General Laws (Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorism Financing) Amendment Bill and go through the bill clause by clause. But the committee had not received the final report when the meeting convened.
The committee secretariate said it only received National Treasury’s input on Tuesday and had not had time to finalise the report. MPs could be shown a draft version of the report during the meeting.
Committee chairperson Joe Maswanganyi (ANC) asked Treasury to explain why it had submitted its input on Tuesday, whereas it had been agreed that its response would be sent to the secretariate by Monday evening at the latest.
In most cases, MPs received a report on a bill a day before they were due to consider it, so they had time to study the report and consult their political parties and legal advisers.
“This is what we call an ambush. It is unaccepted, and we have never done things like this before,” Maswanganyi said.
Maswanganyi’s opposition to the “irregular” fast-tracking of the bill was supported by MPs from his party, the DA and the Freedom Front.
The DA’s Dr Dion George said: “This is not how bills should be processed, because we are not supposed to be doing work in a sloppy manner […] A proper and robust process needs to be followed so that the people we represent are satisfied that we have, in fact, done our job properly as is required by the Constitution.”
As a result of the delay in finalising the report, the meeting was adjourned until Thursday evening. (Update 04/11/22: The committee postponed its meeting to 10 November.)
No socio-economic impact assessment
Maswanganyi was particularly unhappy that Treasury has not assessed the socio-economic impact of the General Laws Amendment Bill.
The “very critical” piece of legislation would have significant implications, and it was unacceptable that “a big department” such as Treasury could not conduct an impact assessment.
He said it was a legislative requirement that a bill should come with an impact report.
“This matter of FATF [Financial Action Task Force] was with Cabinet from 2017. What was the reason for all these years not conducting an [impact assessment]?”
It was unacceptable that “when we process FATF issues, we have to violate the procedures of the Republic”.
If the proper parliamentary process was not followed, the legislation could be challenged in the Constitutional Court, he said.
Treasury trying to accommodate stakeholders
Treasury’s chief director of financial sector policy, Vukile Davidson, apologised for the late submission of Treasury’s input.
He said that as late as Tuesday morning Treasury was engaging with one or two stakeholders in an attempt to reach as much of a consensus as possible.
“It has been extremely difficult, given the wide range of legislative areas this [bill] has covered.”
Treasury received an exemption from Cabinet for an impact assessment because of the “massive time constraints we were under”, Davidson said.
Treasury’s director of fiscal and intergovernmental legislation, Jeannine Bednar-Giyose, said Treasury has had significant engagements with the Department of Social Development about the amendments to the Non-profit Organisations Act and has tried to develop proposals that will address as many of the concerns raised by the NPO sector as possible.
Another area that had involved substantial engagements was the amendments to the Companies Act, particularly the submissions relating to the requirements for listed companies to provide information about beneficial ownership.
“We had a number of engagements with stakeholders to try to develop appropriate proposals,” she said. “We really wanted to make sure that what we would propose would be workable and sound and would address, in actual practice, the concerns that were raised in the submissions.”
Letter to the minister
Maswanganyi asked Parliament’s senior legal adviser to draft a letter to Minister of Finance Enoch Godongwana asking why the bill had been tabled without an impact assessment. The committee would include the reasons provided by the minister in its report.
