The Unholy Alliance: How Banks Enable the Looting of Our State

The staggering revelation from the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) that R2 billion was siphoned out of Tembisa Hospital is not just another corruption headline. It is a post-mortem on the moral collapse of our governance system.

It reveals a cancer that has metastasised fed not only by corrupt officials and politicians but by a banking sector that profits from the proceeds of crime while pretending not to see, while closing the accounts of black entrepreneurs, professionals, and organisations under the guise of reputational concerns, while they themselves being complicit in aiding criminal syndicates.

Under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA), financial institutions are legally obliged to detect and report suspicious transactions. Yet billions flowed from a public hospital to a web of front companies and into luxury assets, without raising alarms.

This is not oversight; it is complicity.

South Africa is not unique. Across the world, banks have enabled criminal enterprises:

• Gupta Family / State Capture: Billions looted from Eskom, Transnet, and other SOEs were moved through South African and global banks, including HSBC and Standard Chartered. These banks ignored red flags while public money was siphoned offshore.
• Danske Bank (Estonia): Between 2007–2015, €200 billion in suspicious Russian and Azerbaijani funds were laundered through its branches. Internal warnings were ignored in the pursuit of profit.
• HSBC (Mexico & Colombia): In 2012, HSBC admitted to laundering nearly $900 million for drug cartels. Staff looked the other way while blood money flowed freely.

These examples prove a consistent pattern: banks profit from criminal transactions until they are exposed. They pay fines but rarely face true accountability. Unless South Africa tackles not only corrupt officials but also the financial enablers, the looting will never stop. The bloodstream of corruption runs through our banks.

The fight against corruption is global. Just as the Guptas, VBS, and Tembisa looters used banks as conduits, so too did HSBC, Danske, and others abroad. The lesson is clear: corruption survives not only in government offices, but in the financial institutions that look the other way.

The SIU’s interim report reads like a mafia script. Syndicates who manipulated procurement, created shell companies, and invoiced for goods that never arrived.

Inside accomplices greased the machinery of theft. The loot did not vanish in cash-stuffed envelopes it was paraded in Lamborghinis and luxury mansions. And crucially, every cent of it flowed through the arteries of our banking system.

This is where the silence becomes deafening. Banks are not innocent bystanders.

They are bound by law under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act (FICA) to detect and report suspicious transactions. Algorithms exist to flag unusual flows. And what could be more suspicious than hundreds of millions flowing from a public hospital into a daisy-chain of interlinked companies, only to re-emerge as sports cars and gated estates? That this tsunami of corruption did not set off alarm bells is not just a failure of oversight it is complicity by omission.

The Tembisa heist is not an anomaly; it is a pattern. Just as the SIU pulled this scandal into the light, another looting machine was being assembled at the Government Pensions Administration Agency (GPAA). Billions in workers’ pensions were at stake. It took the vigilance of the Public Service & Commercial Union (PSCU), to blow the whistle and demand urgent intervention by the Minister of Finance. Without that intervention, another Tembisa-scale disaster would have been written into the obituary of our state.

The lesson is chilling. Health budgets, pension funds, education grants nothing is sacred. The state has become a carcass from which syndicates feast. And for every scandal unearthed, two more are waiting in the shadows. We are not dealing with isolated criminals; we are facing an industrial-scale enterprise of looting.

That is why cosmetic reforms won’t cut it. We need a total war on corruption, fought on every front:

• The SIU and NPA must be fully resourced and politically protected so prosecutions actually land, with convictions and asset seizures that hurt.
• Parliament must summon bank CEOs and force answers: how did their “sophisticated systems” miss the obvious?
• Financial institutions must face not just fines but criminal liability for facilitating money laundering, whether by negligence or design.

If we continue to treat corruption as the misdeeds of a few rotten officials, we will lose. The real battlefield is broader. The laundering of stolen public money through banks is the bloodstream of state capture. Cut off that flow, and the syndicates wither. Allow it to continue, and South Africa bleeds out.

The soul of this nation is at stake not in abstract terms, but in hospital wards without medicine, in pensioners betrayed of their life savings, in children robbed of classrooms. To allow banks and officials alike to shrug and carry on is to surrender to decay. This is not just about accountability. It is about survival. And survival demands that we confront not only the thieves in government corridors but also the financiers who count their profits while the state collapses.

* Tahir Maepa is the Secretary General of the Public Service and Commercial Union of South Africa (PSCU) and founder of Resistance Against Impunity Movement (RAIM) NPC.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.