The Financial Intelligence Centre has issued 342 administrative sanctions and N$19.91 million in penalties following a 1 300% surge in anti-money laundering compliance failures.
This is from just 25 sanctions the previous year.
The centre’s 2025 annual report shows that the sanctions resulted in N$19.91 million in financial penalties for institutions that failed to comply with the Financial Intelligence Act and the Prevention and Combating of Terrorist and Proliferation Activities Act.
According to the report, the sharp rise in sanctions reflects increased supervisory activity and tougher action against repeat offenders.
“This significant increase is aligned to supervision activities and reflects continuous efforts to address findings of repeat non-compliance with the acts through effective, proportionate and dissuasive enforcement measures,” it says.
The sanctions were imposed on a range of institutions, including banks, legal practitioners, property agents, trust and company service providers, and casinos.
The FIC says institutions were penalised for several compliance failures, including failing to conduct enhanced due diligence on high-risk clients, failing to identify the true beneficial owners of businesses, and failing to report suspicious or large cash transactions.
Other shortcomings included inadequate monitoring systems and failing to screen clients against the United Nations Security Council sanctions lists.
In some cases, businesses also had their operations suspended because of serious breaches of anti-money laundering obligations.
According to the report, these included weaknesses in enhanced due diligence procedures, controls relating to politically and prominently influential persons, suspicious activity reporting, electronic funds transfer reporting, staff training, independent compliance reviews, risk management systems and beneficial ownership requirements.
Meanwhile, the FIC’s operational analysis found that fraud and Ponzi schemes remained the most common crimes linked to money laundering, accounting for 30% of all cases analysed.
Tax offences were the second most common predicate offence at 13%, followed by theft (10%), drug trafficking (9%) and corruption (6%).
The report also identifies terrorism, murder, poaching, counterfeit piracy, robbery and bribery as other offences connected to money-laundering investigations.
