The South African Revenue Service has been urged to apply punitive measures on corporate companies especially mines that are evading tax while doing business with companies in neighbouring countries.
This emerged at a three-day dialogue hosted by two civil society groups in Pretoria.
African Monitor and Economic Justice Network say their research has found that South Africa is one of the biggest losers, especially in the mining sectors owing to illicit financial flows.
It is estimated that about R30-billion leaves the country annually through secret deals. An expert in illicit financial flows, Taku Fundira, says these activities are a threat to Africa’s economy.
“So it’s an estimated $2-billion which R30-billion for 2016 alone. These are huge matches when you look at the trade data. Suffice to say there’s an issue around platinum coming from Zimbabwe that’s refined here. So those kinds of things we are going to fine tune in the final analysis to find out to what extent that affects the current values that we have.”
Fundira says, “We’ve also looked at different companies in the platinum and gold sectors to start looking at their finances and see to what extent these are inconsistent.”
