Ghana’s tax authority says the fine is for unpaid tax obligations for 2014–2018. During these years, GRA claims that MTN underreported its revenue in Ghana by about 30%. The $773 million tag also comprises penalties for non-disclosure and interest charges.
The MTN Group, says MTN Ghana believes that the taxes due have been paid during the period under assessment and has resolved to defend MTN Ghana’s position on the assessment vigorously.
MTN Group and MTN Ghana will continue to engage with the relevant authorities on this matter and MTN remains resolute that MTN Ghana is a tax-compliant corporate citizen.

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Elon Musk’s satellite internet firm, Starlink, has announced plans to set up shop in Kenya. The internet service is awaiting regulatory approval and is on course to be accessible in a number of cities, including Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, and Nakuru, by June 2023.
In May, last year, SpaceX received the licence to operate in Nigeria and Mozambique. Several Nigerians who pre-ordered it have reportedly been receiving their Starlink kits.
Albeit pricey, this means faster internet speed in Kenya even in rural places and bigger competition for internet service providers like Telkom, Airtel, Safaricom, Zuku

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The Bank of Tanzania gave an update on the East African country’s progress, stating that it was taking a phased, cautious and risk-based” approach in the adoption of a CBDC.
The BoT says it’s taking this approach after discovering that six countries across the world abandoned their CBDC plans after encountering technical and structural challenges.
The Bank of Tanzania will continue to monitor, research and collaborate with stakeholders, including other central banks, in the efforts to arrive at a suitable and appropriate use and technology for issuance of Tanzanian shillings in digital form,” the statement read.

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TeamApt, a Nigerian fintech company, has shed its name and adopted the name of its flagship product—Moniepoint.
The company says the move is a testament to the success of Moniepoint and a desire to bring the company closer to its customers.
Moniepoint will also relocate its headquarters to London, a move the company says is inspired by its ambition to be “an employer of choice, not just in Africa, but globally. Moniepoint say there are expansion plans into East Africa and North Africa, which will depend on identifying large markets where millions of businesses are underserved.

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BioNTech, the German biotech company that became a medical powerhouse in 2020 after creating one of the world’s most effective COVID-19 vaccines, will pay a total sum of £582 million to acquire 100% shares of InstaDeep, the Tunisian London-headquartered artificial intelligence startup.
The transaction involves an upfront payment of cash and unspecified BioNTech shares worth £362 million, and a balance of £200 million payable based on InstaDeep’s future performance.
This deal is coming after the 14-year-old German vaccine manufacturer participated in InstaDeep’s Series A last January, and an overall good partnership history between the two companies.

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Meta has denied harmful posts will escape review, after the contractor running Facebook's main moderation hub for east Africa, Sama, announced it would stop providing content-review services to social-media platforms.
Meta says it had been Sama's decision and Sama blamed the "economic climate".
In May, a former moderator who claims the work harmed his mental health sued both firms.
Sama says it would let go about 3% of its staff, mostly from the Nairobi office, where they remove posts flagged for review if they break the platform's rules, and focus on its computer-vision work.
Meta says it would "work with our partners during this transition to ensure there's no impact on our ability to review content".

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Reports suggested that Microsoft had acquired Fungible, a startup fabricating a type of data center hardware known as a data processing unit, for around $190 million.
Microsoft confirmed the acquisition but not the purchase price, saying that it plans to use Fungible’s tech and team to deliver multiple DPU solutions, network innovation and hardware systems advancements.
Girish Bablani, the CVP of Microsoft’s Azure Core division, says Fungible’s technologies help enable high-performance, scalable, disaggregated, scaled-out data center infrastructure with reliability and security.
Fungible was launched in 2016 by Bertrand Serlet, a former Apple software engineer who sold a cloud storage startup, Upthere, to Western Digital in 2017, alongside Krishna Yarlagadda and Jupiter Networks co-founder Pradeep Sindhu.

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Uganda's Constitutional Court has quashed a section of a communications law that had been used to prosecute journalists and critics of the government.
The judges ruled that prohibiting people from using electronic communication to disturb the peace of others curtailed freedom of speech.
Punishments for offenders ranged from a fine to a jail term.
Writer Kakwenza Rukirababashaija and the academic Stella Nyanzi were among activists who were either been charged or convicted under the law.

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The Federal Communications Commission regulates lots of industries and practices relating to telecommunications and the internet, but it is now cementing its role as a space regulator by voting to create a brand-new bureau specializing in the topic.
The newly minted Space Bureau will handle all business relating to satellite approval, orbital communications, and space debris, among other things.
These are things the agency was already doing, but now they’ll have a new, more effective organization to do them in.
Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel says the satellite industry is growing at a record pace, but here on the ground, the regulatory frameworks for licensing have not kept up.
The current International Bureau is being cannibalized to form it, but it sounds like more of an upgrade than a dissolution.

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Releaf ,an agritech startup disrupting Africa’s oil production industry, has secured $3.3 million pre-Series A funding. The funding round, which the startup says was oversubscribed, will support the roll-out of key technologies that could further drive the development and sophistication of Africa’s crude oil processing techniques, and possibly lead to the much-needed increase in vegetable oil production on the continent.
Ikenna Nzewi co-founder of Releaf says they took a much more broad approach to what the solution would be, but they really wanted to decide on a specific crop to work in and they found that opportunity in the oil palm sector.

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