The Financial Intelligence Authority (FIA) has revealed that a meeting slated to be held in January 2023 will determine whether Uganda will be struck off the list of nations that haven’t put in place modalities to avert money laundering in the world.
The presumption was made by Michael Tukei, the FIA Executive Director during a media training organized by African Centre for Media Excellence where he said that Uganda has tried to address all the loopholes in the laws and implementation that are facilitating money laundering in Uganda.
It should be recalled that in January 2022, the FIA warned Parliament that Uganda risks being blacklisted by the Financial Action Taskforce (FATF) if the government does not tackle money laundering by May 2022 and the blacklist would lead to the cutting off of Uganda’s banking sector from the international community and no single dollar will be transacted through Uganda’s Financial system.
The Authority revealed that the FATF maintains a watch list of countries that have significant shortfalls in tackling money laundering categorised under the grey list and the black list and Uganda made it to that list in May 2020, and if the requirements aren’t fulfilled, it would affect the Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) because investors will not want to associate with countries where bringing in and taking out money is difficult and probably choose to stay away.
Following the looming threat, Government moved swiftly to pass into law several legislations to avert the threat through the enactment of; The Trustees Incorporation (Amendment) Bill, 2022, The Anti-Terrorism (Amendment) Bill, 2022, The Anti-Money Laundering (Amendment) Bill, 2022, The Cooperative Societies (Amendment) Bill, 2022, The Partnerships (Amendment) Bill, 2022, The Companies (Amendment) Bill and The Insolvency (Amendment) Bill, 2022.
Now, Tukei has revealed that a meeting will be held on 9th January 2023 in Morocco where Uganda’s status will be reviewed before a final decision is taken on whether to remove Uganda from the money laundering black list.
“It means that the country has agreed to address the identified gaps. But out of the 22requirements, we are remaining with about 8 of them and those that were remaining include the laws that were passed and we have also produced the regulations and there was a meeting held in Zambia with FAFT and there will be another meeting to be held on 9th January in Morocco where we shall present what we have done. We expect by the end of July-August to exited the black list,” said Tukei.
As of March 2020, Iran and North Korea were the only countries on the blacklist, while the grey list has 24 nations, six of these found in Africa alongside Uganda, Burkina Faso, Mali, Morocco, South Sudan and Zimbabwe.
The Financial Intelligent Authority also called for enactment of laws to regulate crowd funding because that could be used by wrong people to collect money to facilitate illegal activities like terrorism in Uganda.
