Parliament - The EFF on Friday called on Sars to probe Lonmin for tax evasion, following testimony before the Farlam Commission of Inquiry that the company paid large commissions to agents in Bermuda.
“Now that there is hard evidence, the EFF calls on Sars to investigate Lonmin and its directors with the aim of criminal prosecution in instances where deliberate tax avoidance is discovered,” Economic Freedom Fighters spokesman Mbuyiseni Ndlozi said.
Ndlozi expressed outrage that Lonmin paid about R200 million a year in sales commissions to a company it owned in tax-free Bermuda.
“What this means is that Lonmin, where mineworkers were murdered and where Cyril Ramaphosa is a director, has been claiming that they do not have money to pay workers the R12 500 minimum wage, while they are in reality shifting billions of rands to tax havens,” he said.
This follows a report in the Mail & Guardian on Friday which recalled that in testimony before the Farlam commission this week, a Lonmin official said the mining house only stopped paying sales commissions to the Bermuda-based company in 2012 because of resistance from local subsidiary Incwala.
The newspaper pointed out that in 2010 Ramaphosa's Shanduka group acquired a controlling stake in Incwala.
The EFF has made so-called transfer pricing, which it says mining houses use to cheat the SA Revenue Service out of a fortune, one of its main causes since taking up seats in Parliament in June.
The party has repeatedly portrayed Deputy President Ramaphosa as a capitalist complicit in the deaths of 34 Lonmin mineworkers, shot dead by police at Marikana, North West, during a strike on August 16, 2012.
The Farlam commission is investigating these deaths, and the killing of 10 people, including two police officers and two security guards, in the preceding week.
Sapa