CBK Governor Kamau Thugge/courtesy.
NAIROBI, Kenya, April 4 – Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) Governor Kamau Thugge says that delinkage of Safaricom from M-Pesa faces a tax liability hurdle of about Ksh75 billion that has slowed the process.
Thugge during CBK’s Monetary Policy Committee briefing Thursday asserted that despite the setbacks the monetary regulator is committed to see to it that the separation beats fruition.
”We believe that there should be a separation and that Central bank should oversight M-Pesa and therefore we will continue to engage treasury and Safaricom to see how quickly this separation should be done,” he said.
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In December last year, Thugge confirmed that there have been complications in terms of the amount of tax to be paid for the severing a figure he now caps at Ksh75 billion.
Earlier, Safaricom which domiciles the mobile money transfer services were opposed to the transfer in what is said would present an array of shortcomings.
The Telco last year argued that higher transaction costs for users would result from the split, placing the subsidiary business and those held by other comparable service providers at a competitive disadvantage.
It also cited the Finance Act currently in place as a huge stumbling block which in essence lowers the excise duty on bank transactions from 20 percent to 15 percent as well as scaling up the mobile money transfer levy to 15 percent up from 12 percent previously.
