MORE EVIDENCE UNCOVERED ON HOW STATE DOCUMENTS WERE LEAKED

LOBAMBA – The Minister of Finance, Neal Rijkenberg, says more evidence is coming to light about how State documents from the Eswatini Financial Intelligence Unit (EFIU) were leaked.
The minister said they have had three audits at the EFIU that looked at strengthening the system to ensure that the leak never happens again. He said the investigations have yielded results and made recommendations that were applied. He added that two deep audits were done to identify who leaked the documents. “The bottom line is we are not coming up with an actual name, but we have the exact time and how it happened,” he said.The minister added that some of the information that was uncovered by the auditors was that the EFIU went through a process of changing its server. During the move in 2022, something happened in the system that caused the problems.

Rollover

“We are in a safe territory now, but unfortunately, in that rollover something popped-out,” he said. The minister said he was consulting on whether he should table the audit report as well.
He was responding to a question that was asked by Ngudzeni MP Charles Ndlovu. The MP asked if the strengthening of the laws would prevent instances such as the EFIU leaks.
More than 890 000 internal records from the EFIU were allegedly leaked to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), an elite investigative media company.

Documents

These documents include financial records allegedly obtained from the EFIU and were used to compile reports that were published under the banner of ‘Swazi Secrets’ or ‘Open Secrets’.
They touched on politicians, businesspeople and other high-profile people, linked to financial transactions which they purportedly carried out over a period of about six years from 2016.
The EFIU serves as a national centre for the receipt and analysis of suspicious transaction reports and relevant money laundering information, associated predicate offences and terrorist financing. It is used by institutions, such as the Central Bank of Eswatini (CBE) and banks to analyse certain financial transactions that have been red-flagged. It must be noted that not all transactions reported to the EFIU are deemed fraudulent.

Some of the information carried in the leaked reports touches on the Farmers Bank and its application for a licence with the CBE. It also outlines the circumstances by which the Farmers Bank settled at Bulembu town, where its offices were located. One of the reports also details how millions of Emalangeni were withdrawn from the Eswatini National Provident Fund (ENPF) and distributed into accounts of certain individuals, whose identities have been deliberately withheld because no such evidence had yet been availed by the authors.
The money, according to the reports, was for shares at Eswatini Mobile. The reports also state in detail how two people formed a company and used some State facilities to refine gold for export.

It alleges that the individuals preferred Eswatini due to that they were allowed to repatriate as much resources as possible from the kingdom.The reports also touch on the Nhlangano-Sicunusa Road construction and how funds for the project were sourced. The reports have put Eswatini under the spotlight, as some foreign news wires mulled that if such reports were true, Eswatini risked being grey-listed by international financial institutions.

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