The Sunday News
Richard Muponde, Harare Bureau
THE Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) is set to recruit more than 20 financial crimes experts to strengthen its supervision of financial transactions and enhance its capacity to investigate economic crimes.
The FIU, which falls under the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ), has upped the ante against financial crimes, particularly illicit currency trading and abuse of the foreign currency auction system.
Currently, it has a staff complement of 27 permanent workers.
It intends to recruit 19 experts in forensic auditing and accounting as well as other specialists.
FIU director-general Mr Oliver Chiperesa told our Harare Bureau that the new staff will also boost the organisation’s capacity to track money that is siphoned out of the country.
“More qualified and experienced analysts using modern transaction monitoring and analysis tools can only result in a greater number as well as better quality intelligence reports to law enforcement agencies. It will also make us more effective in cooperating and exchanging intelligence with foreign counterpart FIUs, since a significant amount of funds are being laundered out of the country to foreign jurisdictions where we will need to track them,” he said.
It is envisaged that the new experts will also strengthen the unit’s supervision and monitoring of non-bank financial institutions, including designated non-financial businesses.
Suspicious transactions by professionals such as lawyers, accountants, estate agents, casinos and precious stone dealers could also be easily monitored to improve compliance with anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism regulations.
“Unlike banks, which have in place stronger controls, most of these other sectors have not yet reached the level of compliance that we want them to be at. They submit far fewer suspicious transaction reports than they should. So, with increased FIU capacity, we will see more and more transactions being reported by other sectors instead of the current status where it is mostly banks that report,” added Mr Chiperesa.
Capacity enhancement in the FIU, he also said, should be mirrored in other law enforcement agencies.
“In other words, we will have the FIU referring more and more cases, but if the law enforcement agencies and prosecutors do not have the numbers, tools as well as appropriate training in the area of financial investigations and prosecution, then we may still not reach the desired levels of effectiveness as a country.”
Although the FIU has been operating with limited resources due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it has made significant progress such as helping coordinate Zimbabwe’s recent removal from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list.
“That was the time when Zimbabwe had just been placed on the FATF grey list of insufficiently compliant countries and it fell on the FIU to coordinate implementation of a nation action plan that was needed for us to get out of the grey list. That was also the time when we had to take decisive regulatory action to rein in mobile money service providers when mobile money services were being abused to fuel the foreign exchange parallel market.”
FIU’s work includes analysing a broad range of financial transactions data from financial institutions and designated non-financial businesses and professions (DNFBPs), and preparing financial intelligence reports to share with stakeholders.
It also supervises financial institutions and DNFBPs to ensure and enforce compliance with Anti Money Laundering and Counter Financing of Terrorism (AMLCFT) legal and regulatory requirements.
The mandate to monitor traders’ compliance with requirements of the Bank Use Promotion Act and ensuring that they conduct transactions through formal banking channels also lies with the FIU.
Government is presently waging a war against economic saboteurs whose actions are undermining the value of the local currency.
Over 200 local businesses have been slapped with heavy penalties by the FIU for manipulating the foreign currency exchange rate through illicit currency trading and abusing the foreign currency auction system.
Some of the businesses flagged by the unit were the alleged top financiers behind the black-market foreign currency trading.
