Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe has promised that the recently promulgated Financial Intelligence Centre Amendment (Fica) Bill will be speedily implemented.
Radebe said yesterday there should not be any delays in implementing the law. This would happen after the Minister of Finance, Malusi Gigaba, issued regulations and gazetted the law.
He said it should not take time between the signing of the bill into law and the issuing of regulations for the implementation of the new legislation.
“The Minister of Finance is on record in Parliament as saying he will expedite the regulations. There is urgency in finalising it,” said Radebe.
Gigaba told Parliament last week he would not delay the process of issuing regulations and ensuring the bill was implemented immediately.
Radebe said this was an important piece of legislation and there should not be delays in issuing regulations.
However, Justice and Correctional Services Minister Michael Masutha expressed reservations on some aspects of the new act. Masutha said beyond the issue of regulations there were provisions they were still not happy about after the bill was signed into law.
“Our interest as a security cluster is that the purpose of Fica is to facilitate our own work to fight financial crimes,” he said.
He said the security cluster was concerned that the governance council, which was in the previous bill, had been done away with in the amended bill. He said the removal of the structure would weaken co-operation between law enforcement agencies.
“The abolition of that structure does away with that critical point of convergence,” said Masutha.
However, said Masutha, the security cluster was in discussions with the economics cluster on how to address the problem. The bill had been signed into law in time for the meeting of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a body that monitors and fights money laundering and the financing of terrorism.
The meeting of FATF was scheduled to take place in February, but was postponed to June. This allowed South Africa time to speed up the approval of the Fica Bill in Parliament and its signing into law.
The bill was a source of disagreement between the Black Business Council and Progressive Professionals Forum on the one hand and the Banking Association of South Africa and the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution on the other.