SA’s financial services firms have significantly stepped up efforts to identify financial flows linked to the illegal wildlife trade.
That is the view of Gerald Byleveld, head of financial compliance at Investec who also leads the illegal wildlife trade working group at the SA Anti-Money-Laundering Integrated Task Force (Samlit). In November 2021 Samlit released a report showing 86% of local financial firms that were surveyed had no systems in place to detect financial flows linked to the illegal wildlife trade.
“The banks have really stepped up their game since we released our report in November,” Byleveld said. “The missing link in the fight against [illegal wildlife trade] has always been the banks, the financial sector institutions, and how seriously they treat it. But we’ve noticed a significant improvement since our report was released.”
Byleveld said that in the four months after the Samlit report was issued the number of submissions from SA reporters to the Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) detailing suspected transactions linked to illegal wildlife trade reports rose 10%. He said that improving the quality of information in these reports helps the FIC in its efforts to produce a coherent “intelligence product”, which can be submitted to the Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation (Hawks).
The job of the Hawks is to compile a solid dossier of evidence, which can be submitted to the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) that can lead to arrests and ultimately convictions of the perpetrators of illegal wildlife trade. That speaks to the ultimate goal of Samlit, which was established in December 2019 as a public-private partnership between the FIC, the Prudential Authority (PA) and the financial services sector to help combat illicit financial flows linked to criminal activity.
“Samlit has helped establish co-operation and feedback between the various players,” says Byleveld. “That co-operation is essential because if the banks don’t submit sufficiently detailed reports it can’t be converted into intelligence. Feedback to the banks is also crucial so that the sector doesn’t feel it is submitting reports that don’t lead to any action.”
It’s very hard to report crime when you live in the same community as the people conducting the criminal activity
— Gerald Byleveld, head of compliance at Investec
Since the release of Samlit’s initial report the group has decided to upgrade several of the parties it previously considered as stakeholders to partners to further improve co-operation between the various public and private entities. Byleveld said that the Hawks and NPA are now considered partners and have also been joined by the department of forestry, fisheries & environment, and SA Revenue Service (Sars).
“We realised quite early on that a lot of the groups that we designated as stakeholders in the first phase should actually have been partners,” he said. “The addition of Sars as one of our partners is also critically important. They obviously can’t share any of their intelligence with us as it is confidential taxpayer information but they can take some of the shared information from the other partners and incorporate it into their own processes.”
Samlit and its partners are meeting weekly and Byleveld says their investigative efforts against suspected players in the illegal wildlife trade are gaining momentum. Yet, he acknowledges that the fight against the illegal wildlife trade is not without risk as evidenced by the murder of 49-year old Timbavati game ranger Anton Mzimba who was gunned down outside his Bushbuckridge home in Mpumalanga last month.
“This is a dangerous game,” said Byleveld, adding that the risk is also what makes it difficult for citizens to report suspected poaching or illegal wildlife trade-linked activities.
Online nodal point
“It’s very hard to report crime when you live in the same community as the people conducting the criminal activity, he said. “But the public is our first line of defence so we are looking at how we can provide people with an easier and anonymous mechanism to report suspicious activity in a confidential manner.”
Byleveld said Samlit is working to potentially create an online nodal point for people to report suspected illegal wildlife trade. That would replicate a similar online reporting portal that Australian authorities created, which resulted in a significant improvement in leads that could later be investigated.
Samlit’s ultimate target is to identify the syndicate heads by following the money trail from the poachers to the ringleaders higher up the criminal food chain. Byleveld said one of the problems for law enforcement efforts in SA is that due to the country’s high unemployment rate, focusing attention solely on the poachers does not serve as a realistic deterrent to poaching and illegal wildlife trade.
“The problem is that the poacher on the ground is very replaceable in SA — they’re pawns in the bigger scheme of things,” he said. “You catch one poacher today and tomorrow there’s another one in his place. You want to focus on the poacher’s financial information to see who they’re transacting with to get closer to the syndicate leaders.”
As the name suggests syndicates involve wide networks of players ranging from corrupt police officers and customs officials to intermediaries in the transport sector, and other people who can connect buyers and sellers. Focusing on illicit financial flows also allows prosecutors to add additional money-laundering charges while organised criminal activity can also see racketeering added to a charge sheet, all resulting in longer sentences.
“If you follow the money it’s likely to lead you to the people higher up in the syndicate. And if you’re successful in adding the money-laundering charge people will spend more time behind bars. If you simply convict someone for the predicate crime of poaching you’re looking at five years, some of which is usually suspended so after two or three years they’re out. But if you add more years to the sentence for money laundering or racketeering suddenly the sentence becomes a bigger deterrent.”
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