Financial Intelligence agencies keep SADC borders safe

Financial Intelligence and AML/ CFT have been applauded for keeping the SADC Borders and the SADC region safe from financial irregularities that can upset the financial and economic landscape of the region.

SADC Parliamentary Forum ( SADC- PF) Secretary General, Boemo Sekgoma, said that as representatives of money laundering and the financing of terrorism ( AML/ CFT) agencies, they are stakeholders who are of paramount importance in the monitoring of domestication of the SADC Model law on Public Financial Management ( PFM).

She said the Forum may later through national Parliaments engage their organisations to furnish information through Scorecards or shadow reports on which relevant provisions of the Model Law have been incorporated into domestic law.

Speaking during a meeting of Financial Intelligence and Anti- money laundering agencies on Tuesday this week, organised on the sidelines of the development of the PFM, Sekgoma highlighted that the Model Law on Public Financial Management does not deal in depth with aspects of money laundering and the financing of terrorism, that is AML/ CFT, simply because this would have required a separate normative framework. In brief, AML/ CFT has linkages with PFM.

“I wish to underscore that the Model Law, once adopted by the Plenary Assembly of the Forum, will continue to be work in progress.

Indeed, there will be a need to domesticate the Model Law through the usual routes at national level, in other words through a consultation process that will be made under the auspices of the Executive. “You will undoubtedly form part of this consultation and hence the deliberations today will serve as a first acquaintance to the Model law before it reaches to the domestic level after adoption,” Sekgoma explained. She stated that PFM is one of the teething issues of the SADC region without which there will be no scope of sustained good governance. If a robust PFM framework is the driving wheel for good governance and a thriving democracy, then AML/ CFT is the fuel that ignites the way forward, explained the secretary general, adding that they are both sides of the same coin and they depend on each other.“Recently, there has been much media coverage of initiatives of the Financial Action Task Force ( GAFI) and its dreaded list of high- risk jurisdictions, as well as the efforts made to have African countries removed from the European Union’s Grey list. “I think I am echoing the voice of all Member countries that no Southern African nation would want to be blacklisted with regards to AML/ CFT, with the overall objective being to keep the jurisdiction as clean and business- friendly as possible.

“We fully appreciate that PFM and AML/ CFT are not the same thing. However, if both themes would be superimposed in a Venn diagram, we would have a common denominator, that is a shaded subset denoting an area where AML/ CFT and PFM overlap,” she said.