SA works on exiting grey listing as deadline looms

While South Africa is on track to address all the outstanding action items by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) with regards to the country’s grey listing, it remains a challenge to address all 17 of the remaining action items by February 2025.

“All relevant authorities will need to continue to demonstrate significant improvements and also for such improvements being sustained,” National Treasury said yesterday.

The FATF is the international standard-setting body that oversees global compliance with anti-money laundering rules.

“The February 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 criminalising terrorist financing. It underpins SA’s targeted 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,” Treasury said.

The FATF grey listed South Africa at its February 2023 plenary meetings where a jointly agreed action plan was adopted listing 22 action items linked to the strategic deficiencies identified in the AML/CFT regime.

A greylist refers to the FATF’s practice of publicly identifying countries with strategic AML/ CFT deficiencies.

The FATF maintains two such lists with one being jurisdictions under “increased monitoring” that are actively working with the FATF to address strategic deficiencies in their regimes” and secondly “high-risk jurisdictions subject to a call for action” that are not actively engaging with the FATF.

South Africa is required to address all 22 to exit the greylist.

“The deadlines for addressing the action items fall between January 2024 and January 2025. Should SA be assessed to have largely addressed all items in February 2025, the FATF will schedule an onsite visit in April or May 2025, to confirm that assessment.” –