Ministers have been working tirelessly the past months to ensure that the country meets the necessary requirements of the international watchdog, Financial Action Task Force, to avoid being greylisted.
Namibia was tasked to deal with 13 laws to strengthen its legal systems to fight financial crimes. Greylisting means a country is under increased monitoring due to a lack of policies and procedures to deal with anti-money laundering (AML), combatting the financing of terrorism (CFT), and proliferation financing (CPF) framework.
“We had to work even during weekends to ensure the bills come to parliament as soon as possible. Now the virtual assets bill is one of the bills that have to be tabled to strengthen our legal system for the combating of money laundering and terrorism financing,” said Finance and Public Enterprises Minister Iipumbu Shiimi on Wednesday in the National Assembly, while introducing the virtual assets bill.
FATF is the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog. The inter-governmental body sets international standards which aim to prevent these illegal activities and the harm they cause to society. As a policymaking body, the FATF works to generate the necessary political will to bring about national legislative and regulatory reforms in these areas.
Shiimi added the bill was drafted by him in collaboration with the Financial Intelligence Centre. He added the bill addresses to provide for the licencing and regulation of virtual assets providers, those who deal with cryptocurrency, or crypto assets.
“The bill aims to provide for the licensing and regulation of virtual asset service providers; to designate a regulatory authority to regulate and supervise virtual asset service providers and related activities, for purposes of ensuring consumer protection, preventing market abuse and preventing or mitigating the risk of money laundering and terrorist financing posed by virtual assets markets; and to provide for incidental matters,” listed the minister.
In background, Namibia underwent her second peer review mutual evaluation by the Eastern Southern African Anti-Money Laundering group and FATF.
The evaluation, the minister said, was aimed at assessing the country’s compliance with anti-money laundering and the combating of financing of terrorism and proliferation.
The outcome of that mutual evaluation found that Namibia made substantial progress since its first FAFT mutual evaluation in 2005 as far as technical compliance is concerned, but there remain significant room for improvement, especially on the overall level of effectiveness on the national policy in a legislative regime.