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Thursday 16 August 2018

TANZANIA BREWERIES EYES MEGA PLANT, NEW HEADQUARTERS IN DODOMA

The country’s oldest and largest brewing company, Tanzania Breweries Limited (TBL), eyes to shift its headquarters from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma, where it intends to establish the biggest plant in the country.

The company unveiled on Tuesday that the planned brewery, in the capital city, worth 250bn/- is expected to give the government 100bn/- in Value Added Tax (VAT) and Excise Tax.

Local farmers and residents will also benefit from the investment as the facility will be consuming 5.6 million tonnes of materials annually and will create over 600 jobs.

The good news came out after the Parliamentary Committee on Industry, Trade and Environment toured the TBL headquarters in Dar es Salaam, during which they saw the production chain of the company’s drinks.

“The new plant will have substantial contribution to the economy and will bring major changes in Dodoma,” said Mr Davis Deogratius, General Manager of the Tanzania Distilleries Limited (TDL), which is a subsidiary of TBL, when he made a presentation to members of the committee.

The company told the MPs that they had already done a survey on the land that the mega facility will be sitting on; only that now they are working on the paper work, including submitting the detailed plans to the government.

Mr Deogratius mentioned that the company was eager to build the new industry from 2020, which its construction will take about two years.

Commenting on the move, Industry, Trade and Investment Deputy Minister Stella Manyanya commended the company, saying Dodoma has a lot of potential since the government has officially started to relocate its base to the city.

“We will be glad to see you set up the industry even tomorrow and we will be ready to assist you,” Eng Manyanya assured.

However, the company’s management was protesting electronic tax stamp (ETS) management system, saying it was raising their production costs, thus will force them to increase prices of their products and as a result, sales will drop and revenues to the government will also go down.

The ETS is the data recording machines installed at the production facility for marking tax compliance right from the manufacturing process.

Elaborating, TBL Brewery Operations Director Waziri Jemedari said in 2018/19, the company will pay 27.6bn/- to the company owning the ETS system which was tendered by the Tanzania Revenue Authority (TRA).

He complained that such a huge amount of money paid to the ‘middleman’ was wastage since the TRA could find alternative system of getting real time production in the industry.

“For beer production, we can’t cheat because there is a machine to stamp each bottle to show when produced, I think the TRA can use it to get the data,” he suggested.

However, the company expressed hope that they will get relief if the government fulfills its promise to replace the private ETS system with the Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) in the next two or three years.

“We thank the government that it promised to bring the TTCL onboard to install its system to record data,” he said.

Committee’s Deputy Chairman, Innocent Bashungwa remarked that the government introduced the ETS in a view of creating a win-win situation so that the investor should not benefit at the costs of Tanzanians.

However, he suggested that the government sits with TBL to discuss on improving the system of marking real time production without affecting the industry’s performance.


Daily News

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