The South African Revenue Service (SARS) announced that President Cyril Ramaphosa and his businesses, namely the Ntaba Nyoni Estate and Ntaba Nyoni Feedlot, have fulfilled their tax responsibilities up to this point.
Also read: SARS confirms dollars paid to Ramaphosa’s farm were not declared
SARS Commissioner Edward Kieswetter made this declaration in response to significant public attention and unease over the president’s tax affairs. He further stated that Ramaphosa and the two organisations granted SARS permission to publicly disclose their tax compliance status.
Ramaphosa made the appeal subsequent to the Democratic Alliance (DA) party’s dissemination of SARS’s response to a Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) request submitted in December.
The request inquired as to whether Hazim Mustafa, a Sudanese entrepreneur who gave Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala farm $580,000 in cash, had reported the sum. SARS told the DA that they couldn’t find any proof that Mustafa had reported the money he brought into the country in December 2019.
News24 reported that Mustafa said he gave Sylvester Ndlovu, an employee at Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala farm, $580,000 in cash on Christmas Day 2019, but he never got the buffaloes he said he bought.
Ramaphosa claims that Ndlovu transferred the money from a safe in the main building of the farm and concealed it beneath the cushions of a sofa in the president’s house.
In the early hours of 9 February 2020, robbers broke into the property and took an unspecified amount of dollars.
The theft of the money and the fact that it wasn’t clear what it was used for sparked controversy and led to an investigation.
The incident was a significant blow to the reputation of President Ramaphosa, who had made fighting corruption a top priority of his administration.
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Picture: The Presidency of the Republic of South Africa