Trade, Industry and Competition (dtic) Minister Parks Tau says South Africa’s efforts to enhance financial integrity and combat money laundering will be implemented through the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) beneficial ownership register and inter-agency collaboration.
Tau was speaking at the launch of the Beneficial Ownership Disclosure Module for Law Enforcement Agencies hosted on Tuesday in Pretoria.
According to Tau, the new model will expose ownership links and make tracing easier for law enforcement officials.
“The companies that the CIPC registers can be abused by people who set them up for the wrong reasons. Shell structures, layered ownership, chains of entities designed so that no one can tell who is really in charge.
“The answer to secrecy is visibility. Under this new module, accredited users from law enforcement agencies get beneficial ownership information in real time, twenty-four hours a day, without obstruction. They can view the supporting documents and download them,” Tau said.
Tau said explained that the purpose is to end a culture of disregard for accountability and transparency, and to stop financial crime in its tracks.
“With the upgrade, investigators can take a single director and see every other entity that person is linked to, active or inactive. They can take an entity under investigation and connect it to every other entity in the CIPC database, not only those on the beneficial ownership register,” he said.
Tau said the dtic will keep working to build a culture of transparency and accountability among corporate citizens.
He said government will keep the country off the grey list, and make South Africa a place where no one can hide behind a company.
“We are held to a higher standard, and we chose to be. We meet that standard by working together with Treasury, the CIPC, South African Revenue Service, the Financial Intelligence Centre, the South African Police Service, National Prosecuting Authority and the private sector, and we give that cooperation its force by putting good data in the hands of the people who fight financial crime,” added Tau.
Speaking at the same launch, the CIPC Commissioner Advocate Rory Voller said collaboration is important to have much greater breakthroughs against financial crime.
“A new cycle of mutual evaluation is ahead of us where the effectiveness report is due on 19 October 2026 to Financial Action Task Force.
“This is saying, let us take advantage of the tools we have and the availability of this newly upgraded Beneficial Ownership Disclosure Module to achieve even more successful investigations and prosecutions and mitigate the risk of money laundering, terrorist financing, and proliferation financing,” said Voller.
Since the register opened on 1 April 2023, the CPIC has received more than three million beneficial ownership filings, covering local and international owners. It has concluded more than 618 investigations,and it has issued more than 350 compliance notices to entities that did not comply, or that tried to abuse the system with false supporting information. – SAnews.gov.za
