Cape Town – South Africa is making progress in addressing the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) concerns but faces challenges in meeting the February 2025 deadline to resolve all 17 remaining action items.
The National Treasury reports that five of the 22 action items have been addressed, focusing on legal provisions against terrorist financing, financial intelligence usage, and AML/CFT supervision resources.
“All relevant agencies and authorities will need to continue to demonstrate significant improvements, and also for such improvements are being sustained,” National Treasury said on Thursday.
The FATF functions as the international body setting standards, ensuring worldwide adherence to regulations against money laundering.
“The February 2024 FATF Plenary adopted a report by the Joint Group, confirming that five of the 22 action items are now addressed or largely addressed. These relate to the legal provisions criminalizing terrorist financing and underpinning South Africa’s targeted financial sanction regimes related to terrorism financing and proliferation financing, increasing the use of financial intelligence from the Financial Intelligence Centre to support money laundering investigations, and increasing the resources of AML/CFT [Anti-Money Laundering and the Combating of the Financing of Terrorism] supervisors,” National Treasury said.
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South Africa was grey-listed in February 2023 due to deficiencies in its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regime.
The country must address all 22 items to exit the grey list, with deadlines ranging from January 2024 to January 2025.
“The deadlines for addressing the action items fall between January 2024 to January 2025. Should South Africa be assessed to have largely addressed all 22 Action Items in February 2025, the FATF will schedule an onsite visit in April/May 2025, to confirm that assessment and make a recommendation to the June 2025 FATF plenary.
“In this cycle of reporting, the FATF also considered that two further action items that were previously not addressed, have now been partly addressed, confirming that 14 of the 17 outstanding action items have now been partly addressed.
“Three action items still have not been addressed as yet. The deadline for South Africa to address (or at least largely address) four of the outstanding action items in the Action Plan, is May 2024,” National Treasury said.
The FATF will assess progress in June 2024, with an onsite visit in April/May 2025 if all items are largely addressed by February 2025. Despite recent improvements, challenges persist in meeting the deadlines.
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Source: AFP
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