New policy on mining underway

A new national policy on mining is in its final stages with a selected technical team working on it before it heads to parliament for debate. “We have finished with validation sessions and now we are going to send the policy to a technical team to make other checks,” Vincent Karega State Minister in charge of Environment, Water and Mines, said. He was speaking to participants in a validation meeting in Kigali that brought together stakeholders in the mining sector and Rwanda Revenue Authority (RRA). “The old policy on mining wasn’t covering all the issues in the sector. There was need to safe guard the country on exploitation and address the taxation issue because profit calculation is very complicated,” Karega said. Karega revealed that that the new policy also needed to consider the damage done to environment during mining and safety of Rwandans involved in the sector. During the meeting most investors insisted that RRA needed to acquaint itself well with the sector in order to come up with a better tax policy. “RRA doesn’t have the practical aspect about the mines. There are so many costs. They come and just want to see a tax invoice,” Martin Kahanovitz of International Eurotrade said. Karega admitted that RRA needed to get a team well versed with mining to properly make follow up. During the meeting the investors agreed on a 2 percent royalty tax that will be imposed on the mineral extractors to replace the profit tax. Ends

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New policy on mining underway