Parliament’s Standing Committee on Finance says the Fica law will help the country’s efforts to combat money laundering.
Committee Chairperson, Yunus Carrim, was commenting Saturday after President Jacob Zuma signed the Bill into law.
“Our country has lost over R600 billion in illicit financial flows over the past 10 years. It is big businesses, not emerging black businesses that are primarily responsible for this. It is the poor and disadvantaged who ultimately bear a disproportional burden,” said Carrim.
He said the Committee believed that opposition to the Bill was based mainly on misunderstandings about or misrepresentations of it. It has always maintained that the Bill does not give the banks any more powers than they currently have, but it does strengthen the capacity of the state to tackle corruption.
“Our government has for over two decades played a major role in shaping the international regulatory standards that the FICA Bill advances. It is certainly not as if our country has simply succumbed to standards set by the imperialist countries of the north,” Carrim said.
Carrim said the Bill will ultimately serve the needs of the poor and disadvantaged the most and is part of our country’s radical economic transformative agenda.
