Last week brought some encouraging news from South Africa: ZAR 5.8 million (around £265,000 or US $355,000) worth of assets belonging to convicted rhino horn trafficker Francis Kipampa have been seized by the authorities.
Kipampa was convicted in January 2025 at Middelburg Regional Court on four charges, including conspiracy to commit crime, money laundering, and illegally trading in a specially protected species. He received an 18-year sentence. Since then, the Asset Forfeiture Unit (AFU) – part of South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority – has been working to recover his assets. Under South African law, seized assets are frozen via court preservation orders, then liquidated and directed either to victim compensation or into state funds such as the Criminal Assets Recovery Account (CARA), which finances law enforcement operations and victim support organisations.
The conviction itself was the result of Project Blood Orange, a multi-agency financial forensic investigation led by the South African Police Service’s Directorate of Priority Crime Investigations alongside KPMG. Crucially, the project was funded by the UK Government’s Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund and other donors coordinated by Save the Rhino International.
This raises an important question: could future investigations into wildlife trafficking networks be funded by the very proceeds they generate?
There is precedent. The US Fish and Wildlife Service has previously received asset seizure funds on top of its regular budget, which were channelled into conservation efforts. A similar model applied here – where proceeds from rhino poachers’ and traffickers’ assets are ringfenced for further wildlife-crime investigations – would be genuinely transformative. It would reduce dependence on external donor funding and create a self-sustaining cycle in which crime, quite literally, pays for its own prosecution.
There is also a broader lesson here about the value of financial forensic investigations. Traditional wildlife-crime enforcement tends to focus on the most visible offenders – the person who pulled the trigger, or the courier caught at the border. Financial investigations go much further up the chain, targeting the kingpins who finance and organise these networks but rarely get their hands dirty. Charges such as money laundering, tax evasion, and fraud attract serious sentences and penalties, and the paper trails they uncover can expose entire criminal networks.
It would be fascinating to see this approach applied to other high-profile figures connected to illegal trade in rhino horn trade – individuals such as John Hume, Danie Groenewald, and Hugo Ras. Even the recent death of alleged kingpin “Big Joe” Nyalunga, shot dead on 23rd May 2026, need not be the end of the trail: forensic analysis of his finances could still reveal much about the networks he operated within.
The Kipampa case shows what is possible. Now let’s make sure the momentum – and the money – continues.