Fica faces uphill battle

The recently promulgated Fica Amendment Act faces further delays or some of its provisions being suspended if it is gazetted by the finance minister. This is if Progressive Professionals Forum (PPF) gets its way.

PPF will ask Minister Malusi Gigaba to not gazette the act until their concerns are addressed.

PPF general secretary Luther Lebelo confirmed to The Citizen that they had asked for a meeting with the minister to lobby him to delay the implementation of the act. “We had a problem with this bill a long time. When it was first passed by Parliament, we asked the president not to pass it because warrantless searches by Fica inspectors were unconstitutional.”

Lebelo said his forum, representing professionals and business people, was unhappy with the removal of the Fica advisory council from the current legislation. The council was to be constituted by Reserve Bank, Sars, Home Affairs, State Security Agency as well as SAPS to provide oversight to Finance Intelligence Center (FIC) and to advise the minister of finance.

The new act, according to Lebelo, replaced the board with commercial banks. “You can not give those powers to the banks. It is a violation of section 205 (3) that gives the police the powers to investigate wrongdoing,” Lebelo explained.

He said PPF was also saddened by replacement of Politically Exposed Persons (PEP) to Politically Influential Persons (PIP), giving the discretion to banks to freeze their banks accounts if they make an annual profit of R20 million yearly.

Lebelo also said PPF was unfazed by advice given to parliamentary committee on finance by senior counsel to the effect that this piece of law would pass constitutional muster. “We know that there has been lots of acts passed and senior counsel saying they are constitutional but being overturned by ConCourt later. They are not an act of God,” he elaborated.

On the question of whether PPF is batting for Gupta-associated businesses, Lebelo said he had never visited Saxonwold. “We issued a statement last week distancing ourselves from president [Jimmy Manyi’s] views that he wants to cure South Africans of Guptaphobia. FIC itself said the country lost R50 billion last year to illicit flow of funds. If media is to be believed that Guptas stole R7 billion, who is responsible for R43 billion? It is white monopoly capital,” he concluded.

Democratic Alliance (DA) spokesperson on finance David Maynier is convinced that this is part of the delay to shield “Jacob Zuma’s most important clients, the Guptas”, as it is likely they will “feel the heat as their business relationships, sources of wealth and sources of funds are subjected to ongoing monitoring by financial institutions in South Africa”.

Maynier chirped in by saying Jimmy Manyi and the PPF were “fighting those who fight corruption in South Africa”. In the act, he said, Domestic Prominent Influential Persons provided legal certainty about whose business relationships would be subjected to ongoing monitoring by financial institutions.

“To the extent that any investigations are conducted, they are conducted by law-enforcement agencies, most importantly the SAPS. The real problem with the implementation of the legislation is weak law enforcement; we have no idea what happened to the 511 cases referred to law enforcement agencies by the FIC in 2015/16.”