News

Cameroon has adopted a new Mining Act (Act No. 2016/017 of 14 December 2016). It reduces the ad valorem royalty rate for precious metals to 5%, whereas it was raised to 15% by the Finance Act, 2015 (Act No. 2014/026 of 23 December 2014). This new Mining Act therefore significantly reduces the tax burden applicable to gold mining companies. For a representative medium grade mine (3g/t) and a gold price of $1250/oz, the average effective tax rate (AETR) drops from 67% to 53%.

The issue of sharing the mining rent between investors and States is of primary importance for WAEMU countries because of their need for resources for their development. While the analysis of legal texts shows that today the harmonization of mining taxation within WAEMU is partially a failure, the economic analysis of the average effective tax rates (AETR) of WAEMU countries reveals a certain convergence with the increase in the overall tax burden.

Updated tax data for 2017 and 2018 are now available for Benin, Burkina Faso and Cote d'Ivoire.
In Benin, the latest finance acts have not changed the mining taxation (Act No. 2016-33 of 26 December 2016 and Act No. 2017-040 of 29 December 2017). Burkina Faso has adopted a new general tax code (Act No. 058-2017/AN of 20 December 2017). In addition, the amounts of the fees and the annual ground fees have been modified by decree (Decree No. 2017-0023/PRES/PM/MEMC/MINEFID of 23 January 2017). In Cote d'Ivoire, the conditions for deductibility of interest have been tightened (Act No. 2017-870 of 27 December 2017).

A video presentation of the legal and tax database to understand everything in 7 minutes.

Bertrand Laporte and Grégoire Rota-Graziosi (University of Clermont-Auvergne, CERDI, FERDI) present the legal and tax database of FERDI on mining taxation in Africa. (Video only in French)