THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LATEST FIC REPORT: THE 6.1BILLION WAS UNDER PF NOT UPND
By Shalala Oliver Sepiso
So yesterday we woke up to a New Diggers article of the 2022 Financial Intelligence Centre (FIC) annual report, which had just been released and it had revealed suspicious financial transactions amounting to ZMW 6.1 billion perpetrated by among others prominent influential persons (PIPs).
Immediately this article was out, the PF propagandists went on the offensive saying that, because this was a 2022 report, it means that the suspicious transactions were done under the United Party for National Development ( UPND) Government and not the Patriotic Front (PF). In fact, Honourable Alaxander Chiteme, this morning, said that “just in 2022, 6.1bn in the FIC report a number that has never even recorded during the so called criminal organization.” Another PF supporter said, “Corruption under UPND has increased by 40% in 2022 according to the FIC Report.”
Clearly, there has been hyped excitement from the opposition that the 2022 FIC report indicts the UPND rule. HOWEVER I HAVE VERY BAD NEWS FOR YOU BA PF. This is not the case.
Going through the report and reading the Scope of the Study, will clearly show you study period, and that the data which was collected and analysed in the study covered the period 1st January 2016 to 31st December 2020. Now who was the president between those two dates? Edgar Changwa Lungu. Which party superintended over these suspicious transactions? The Patriotic Front.
This study mostly followed international trade used to disguise thefts and corruption. The FIC study adopted the Financial Action Task Force (FATF)’s definition of TBML as the “process of disguising the proceeds of crime and moving value through the use of trade transactions in an attempt to legitimise their illegal origins or finance their activities” (2020). The scope of the typology was restricted to international trade in goods.
The study excluded analysis of trade in services due to the difficulty in estimating the fair value and the lack of a standardized definition of services.
Further, the typology excluded the consideration of domestic trade for the following reasons:
(a) domestic trade is less regulated and large in terms of number of transactions. Therefore, the time and resources available to conduct the typology were insufficient; and
(b) the high level of informality in the economy evidenced by high cash usage and non-registration of businesses at company registry and for tax purposes, would have made it difficult to obtain data on domestic trade.
