New Dawn satellite: a shady tax scheme
The New Dawn satellite project was meant to be the breakthrough to power Africa’s communications renaissance. Instead, serious questions have now been raised around its shady tax structuring
At 5:37pm on April 22 2011, from a seaside launch pad in Latin America, a hulking satellite rose into the sky and took up its position over northern Tanzania. The New Dawn Satellite was proudly African — partly funded by local investors and promoted as a way for African schoolchildren, nurses, civil servants and businesses to access world-class Internet and mobile phone networks. But if New Dawn’s purpose was to promote African development, its tax strategy did exactly the opposite. This is evident from the Paradise Papers — 13.4m documents leaked from 19 tax havens and in the possession of amaBhungane and the Financial Mail. These reveal that the companies behind the New Dawn Satellite channelled millions of dollars from African companies and governments through offshore companies in Mauritius, one of the continent’s premier tax havens. Those companies achieved a Mauritian double-whammy: using one kind of offshore company to avoid local taxes and another to pay as little as possibl...
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