By Nelson Banya
HARARE, April 4 (Reuters) – Zimbabwe is looking into
complaints by the mining industry that steep hikes in its fees
and taxes will seriously hurt miners by taking 60 percent of
every dollar they earn, an official said.
“The ministry is presently reviewing the impact of these
fees on the mining sector,” Prince Mupazviriho, the permanent
secretary in the Ministry of Mines, told a mining conference in
Harare on Wednesday.
He offered no details on whether the ministry might reduce
the fees.
The southern African country hiked pre-exploration fees for
most minerals by as much as 8,000 percent in January.
Registration charges for platinum and diamond claims rose to
$2.5 million and $5 million, respectively, in a move it said was
meant to curb the speculative holding of mine titles.
Miners also must now pay annual ground rentals ranging from
$500 per hectare for chrome to $3,000 per hectare for diamonds.
President Robert Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party also is forcing
foreign mining companies to hand over majority stakes to
Zimbabweans, which analysts say is a way to bolster the party’s
coffers ahead of an election expected next year.
In February the Zimbabwe Chamber of Mines told a
parliamentary committee hearing that fees and royalty increases
of 7.5 percent for gold and 10 percent for platinum announced in
the 2012 budget would hit miners who have yet to fully recover
from a decade-long economic crisis.
“It’s estimated that 60 percent of every dollar earned in
revenue goes to the government, making Zimbabwe one of the most
expensive countries to mine,” the chamber’s vice president,
Allan Mashingaidze, told the committee.
Zimbabwe’s mining industry has overtaken the troubled
agriculture sector as the main foreign exchange earner,
contributing $2.6 billion to its $4.4 billion total export
earnings in 2011.
(Reporting by Nelson Banya; Editing by Jon Herskovitz and Jane
Baird)
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