Adri Senekal de Wet is the executive editor of Business Report. Photo: File
SEKUNJALO’s current battle of the banks, is a pertinent reminder of the power that our banking system has, to cut off our lifeblood – access to our own money. But of specific horror and concern, is the bank’s apparent reliance on media reports to flag suspicious behaviour, which then leads to bank account closures.
Imagine a factually flawed and false media report, that gathers momentum with each telling and posting on a myriad of channels, and before you know it, it’s lore and the algorithms deployed to pick up search engine terms and keywords are working overtime. Sometime later your bank opens the paper, starts watching you and you become a person or company of interest.
Next, your bank accounts are closed – and all without having been given any opportunity to prove otherwise, because, if it’s written in the media, it must be true.
In an interview Advocate Erin Richards conducted on a respected business channel recently, Richards spoke about the accountability and responsibilities of the banks.
She was discussing the Zondo Commission of inquiry report into state capture, explaining when and how banks should alert the Financial Intelligence Centre and the South African Reserve Bank to any suspicious behaviour, including money laundering.
Shockingly, in one example, Richards refers to how Standard Bank, which alongside Nedbank, have been heavily implicated in State Corruption, had used adverse media reports – it has an entire department monitoring this – to finally delve into Homex, one of the Gupta family’s shell companies it used to take money offshore.
Standard Bank says it uses algorithms to detect behavioural patterns and track, but it was the media reports that started to surface, that finally got their attention, some years after the money started its offshore journey.
Now, with the best will in the world, and as journalists, we are not financial investigators, nor are we behavioural analysts. And we, like many of our colleagues the world over, get it wrong from time to time. So, to hang a company or even an individual out to dry, based on media reports, instead of performing their own objective analysis and investigations and interrogating the data, is to my mind, lazy, reprehensible, and downright dangerous. What do we pay exorbitant bank fees for?
As impartially as possible, I’ll raise the topic of Sekunjalo and its chairman Iqbal Survé.
A classic South African example of the media dining out on a self-sustaining appetite of negativity. Any rational objectivity and analysis of anything to do with the Group or the characters involved, has long since departed.
What started with a single article of dubious fact in March 2018, gave rise to an entire commission of inquiry (Mpati) in October of that same year, which whilst framed as being about the Public Investment Corporation and its alleged impropriety, was in fact, heavily focused on anything and everything Sekunjalo-related.
The subsequent cornucopia of frenzied media reporting has been a horn of plenty for publishers to drive traffic to their publications, but more seriously, has led to banks basing their decisions on to close the group’s banking facilities – all the companies and some individuals too.
No formal allegations, no court proceedings, and any investigations these banks have done, along with several explorations and deep dives by the JSE and Financial Sector Conduct Authority, have elicited a single shred of proof of any illegal activity.
Thwarted in their mission, they have now relied on adverse media reports, which in their termination notices and court papers, have been used as the excuse for determining reputational risk and summarily terminating these companies’ right to trade through their transactional facilities.
Individual citizens do not escape the net either, as social media is a great place to make unfounded accusations and for bots and humans alike to spread the news. As a media source, I am pretty sure these channels are also monitored, some of those stories making it to mainstream media too, which might later be found to be fake news, but by then it’s too late. Once it’s out there on the net, it’s there for posterity and try what you will, it won’t go away.
The Internet of Behaviour is a real thing, and everyone is monitoring everyone, except apparently, the banks, who as the supposed guardians of our accounts, are not following the money.
They’ve advocated that responsibility to the media.
Adri Senekal de Wet is the executive editor of Business Report.
BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE