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Launch: Expert Discussion of 'Preventing Tax Base Erosion in Africa'

17 October 2016 11:30AM BDST

  • Event

  • Ending 1:15PM BDST

Listen to a podcast of the event.



Please join us for the London launch of “Preventing Tax Base Erosion in Africa: a Regional Study of Transfer Pricing Challenges in the Mining Sector,” a report recently published by the Natural Resource Governance Institute, at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London on 17 October 2016 at 4:30 pm.

The event will include a presentation of the report, discussed by an panel of five experts from African tax administrations, international mining companies and civil society groups, followed by an open debate and a short cocktail reception. To register, please contact Rosemary Ademoroti at [email protected] or +44 (0) 207 747 6345 by 7 October.

The panel is still being finalized, but confirmed members include:

  • Ekpen Omonbude, economic adviser (natural resources), The Commonwealth (moderator)
  • Philip Daniel, honorary professor, Centre for Energy, Petroleum and Minerals Law and Policy, University of Dundee
  • Duncan Onduru, director general, Commonwealth Association of Tax Administrators
  • Diarmid O’Sullivan, policy adviser, ActionAid 
  • Alexandra Readhead, consultant, Natural Resource Governance Institute
The report is a product of a collaborative project of the NRGI, a non-governmental organisation that helps people to realize the benefits of their countries’ endowments of oil, gas and minerals, and independent researcher Alexandra Readhead.

The Africa Progress Panel has identified cross-border transactions between related parties as a major threat to the tax base of African countries. One of the principal vectors of losses in these transactions is “transfer pricing,” which occurs when one company sells a good or service to another related company. Because these transactions are internal, they are not subject to ordinary market pricing and can be used by multinational corporations to shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions, depriving developing country governments of much-needed tax revenues.

This collection of work, consisting of a report and five country case studies, assesses the development and implementation of rules to monitor transfer pricing in the mining sector, in Ghana, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Zambia.

This work sets out a number of recommendations that would help the five case study countries, as well as other countries facing similar challenges, to better address transfer pricing risks in the mining sector through the application of the “arm’s length principle” and alternative tax policy rules.