Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana has confirmed to Parliament that the South African Reserve Bank (SARB) is investigating the fintech company Kastelo over suspected breaches of exchange-control rules, BusinessTech reported. The company was co-founded by Mark Burke, the Democratic Alliance’s federal finance chair, who says he is not personally under investigation.
What the minister said
“It is correct that the SARB is investigating the company concerned and that an affidavit by an investigator in the Financial Surveillance Department of the SARB identified a reasonable suspicion of exchange-control contraventions,” Godongwana said. The SARB suspects that foreign exchange transactions of about R4 billion were conducted in breach of the Exchange Control Regulations. The transactions in question ran from 4 August to 21 November 2025, and the investigation began around October 2025.
The suspected breaches involve two of the allowances South Africans may use to send money abroad. About R6.7 million (R6.688 million) went through single discretionary allowances, and about R3.5 billion (R3.496 billion) through foreign investment allowances. Our guide to exchange control and offshore allowances explains how each allowance works and what they now allow.
According to the report, the funds were allegedly used to buy cryptocurrency assets abroad, which were then sold through local providers, and some clients allegedly did not know that foreign bank accounts had been opened in their names. Kastelo has defended its model, saying it “allowed clients to benefit from price differences between South African and international cryptocurrency markets”.
How it unfolded
Access Bank triggered the investigation when it reported suspicious transactions and carried out its own forensic review. The SARB issued a blocking order on 24 November 2025, stopping withdrawals from Kastelo’s Access Bank account, according to BusinessTech’s earlier reporting. The Gauteng Division of the High Court dismissed Kastelo’s application against it on 28 July 2026 and ordered the company to pay the SARB’s legal costs. Godongwana said an administrative order has also been made effectively preserving about R15 million. We first covered the allegations in August: SARB alleges R4bn crypto breaches by Kastelo.
The July judgment did not find that Kastelo committed the suspected contraventions. The court said the SARB needed only a “reasonable suspicion”, which it described as “a relatively low, objective threshold assessed on the totality of the available information”, and held that this had been met. The SARB’s own case is that “the dominant purpose of the business model is to circumvent the Exchange Control Regulations”. The SARB has also alleged that Kastelo broke rules that apply to Treasury Outsourcing Companies, including by buying and selling foreign currency for its own account and by transacting without clients’ knowledge or participation.
What happens next depends on the SARB’s findings. According to BusinessTech, those findings will determine whether the matter is referred to law enforcement.
Burke’s position
Burke resigned from the company in 2024 and stopped serving as chairperson of the broader Kastelo group in February 2026. In a statement quoted in the report, he said: “I am not the chairperson of Kastelo Proprietary Limited” and “I am not involved in its daily operations”, adding that “No allegation of misconduct or malfeasance has been made against me personally, and I am personally not subject to any investigation.”
The party has still acted. The DA removed Burke from Parliament’s finance committee and its finance cluster after the High Court ruling, while keeping him as federal finance chair, the Sunday Times reported. The ANC’s chief whip, Mdumiseni Ntuli, said Burke “remains a member of parliament and therefore still has an obligation to answer to the ethics committee”.
What is established is that the SARB is investigating, that its investigator has stated a reasonable suspicion, and that the High Court dismissed Kastelo’s challenge to the blocking order. Whether any contravention occurred has not been decided: a reasonable suspicion is a starting point for an investigation, not a finding. More coverage is in our Regulatory and Policy section.
