Dirty money? Buy SA house

BANKS, LAWYERS, ESTATE AGENTS OFTEN DON'T VERIFY SOURCE OF FUNDS

- Giaran Ryan

South Africa°s Atlantic Seaboard is known worldwide for its beauty and attractive real estate, but less well-known are some of the dodgy investors it is attracting.

Using court documents, deeds office records and confidential source information, non-profit organisation Open Secrets, which monitors private sector economic crimes, tracked R162 million in homes purchased by politically connected individuals from mainly Mozambique, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Equatorial Guinea.

This is at a time when SA is trying to get off the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. One of the reasons for SA's sluggish compliance with the FATF requirements is that about 4o% of estate agents and 34% of lawyers failed to meet their reporting requirements in terms of the Financial Intelligence Centre Act.

In 2023, Open Secrets and Platform to Protect Whistle-blowers in Africa lodged a complaint with the National Prosecuting Authority, seeking a seizure and forfeiture order against properties believed to have been purchased with corrupt cash by relatives and associates of former DRC president Joseph Kabila.

Open Secrets said SA authorities failed to follow up on the complaint, despite the FATF's pressure to improve money laundering.

Francis Selemani, Kabila's stepbrother, is reckoned by Open Secrets to have acquired properties worth more than R30 million with misappropriated Congolese state funds.

Selemani and his wife, Aneth Lutale, often used aliases to conceal their identities, which was the ruse used to camouflage their ownership of properties in SA.