PRESIDENT
John Pombe Magufuli will Monday receive the second report on mineral sand from
the team that consists of economists and legal experts.
According to a statement issued by
Director of Presidential Communications Gerson Msigwa, the event will be
broadcasted live by radios, televi-sion, social media platforms and State House
website from 9 am.
The probe team that is chaired by Prof
Nehemiah Ossoro was formed by the president to estab-lish the amount and value
of min-eral sand technically known as copper concentrate exported since 1998.
The second report comes hardly two
weeks after the first report by the probe team of geologists and mineral
experts led by Prof Abdulkarim Mruma which showed that mining companies were
under declaring the amount of taxable minerals in the mineral sand exported for
smelting.
The damning report cost Prof Sospeter
Muhongo his ministe-rial job after President Magufuli sacked him from the
energy and minerals portfolio.
The head of State also sus-pended
Tanzania Minerals Audit Agency (TMAA) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Eng Dominic
Rwekaza and dissolved its Ministerial Advisory Board (MAB).
In the first report released by Prof
Mruma’s team, it was revealed that the country was losing billions of shillings
in revenue from thieving practices by the mining companies.
It was noted that the amount of gold
per tonne found in the mineral sand, according to the report, was between 671 -
2,775 grams, translating to between 7.8 tonnes to 13.16 tonnes for all 277
containers that the government detained at the Dar es Salaam Port.
Prof Mruma’s team worked on 277
containers prevented from being ferried abroad for smelting.
Each container weighed between 20 and
23.1 tonnes.
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