FIC would gain lifestyle-audit powers under Parliament's wider AML bill

This follows up on our first look at Parliament's General Laws (Anti-Money Laundering and Combating Terrorism Financing) Amendment Bill, B15-2026, published earlier this month. It turns out to reach further than the record-keeping and beneficial-ownership changes already covered there: it amends five Acts in total, including the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, the Companies Act, the Close Corporations Act, the Nonprofit Organisations Act, and the Financial Sector Regulation Act. Three changes matter most for estate agencies. First, the Financial Intelligence Centre would gain the power to conduct lifestyle audits, comparing what someone spends against what they declare; property purchases are a classic trigger for exactly that kind of check. Second, accountable institutions would pick up a new duty to assess the money-laundering and terrorist-financing risk of new delivery mechanisms and technologies before using them, not only their existing client base. Third, the beneficial-ownership discrepancy reporting to CIPC introduced earlier in this bill would extend to close corporations as well as companies, closing a gap for older property-holding entities that never converted. None of this is in force yet. The bill has only had its first reading and takes effect only once the President proclaims a commencement date.