Bank and wealth management company Sasfin Holdings has missed the cut-off for releasing financial statements and stands to be suspended from the JSE should it not release them by the end of October, the local bourse says.

Firms are supposed to release results within three months of their year-end, which in Sasfin’s case was the end of June, reports BusinessLIVE.

Sasfin warned the market in an announcement at the end of September that its annual financial statements would be late but would be released on or before 13 October.

The financial services firm has now missed its own target, resulting in the JSE issuing a warning yesterday.

It said if Sasfin did not release the results by the required date it would be suspended from trade.

The delay is because the company’s external audit has not been completed. Companies that miss deadlines are usually smaller firms mired in governance and financial difficulties, and which have extremely low share prices.

Sasfin was named in an Al Jazeera investigation into gold smuggling and money laundering in March ('Gold smugglers use SA banks, bribes to launder money').

The article and investigation said officers at Standard Bank, Absa Bank and Sasfin Bank had been on the payroll of Mohamed Khan, a money launderer working for cigarette magnate and smuggler Simon Rudland.

In May, Sasfin Bank told Al Jazeera it was taking ‘vigorous action against suspended and former employees and clients of its foreign exchange unit and said that it no longer had a relationship with any of the businesses named in (the) article’.

Full BusinessLIVE report