Acacia share price slips again

Dar es Salaam. Acacia Mining (ACA) was the only firm at the Dar es Salaam Stock Exchange (DSE) to experience a huge drop in share price during the year ended September this year, compared to all listed companies.

The share price for the company, which owns three major gold mines, fell to Sh4,980 in September this year from Sh13,820 recorded in September last year, a fall of approximately 200 per cent.

The fall is attributed to the battle of economic dividends between the government of Tanzania, which led into ban of exports of copper concentrates since March this year.

Tanzania accused Acacia of tax evasion stretching back years. Acacia was accused of under-declaring revenues and tax payments over a number of years by tens of billions of US dollars.

The government later sent the company a $190-billion bill in fines and allegedly unpaid taxes from two of its mines over the period of two decades.

The major downfall was experienced since May this year, two months after ban of concentrates exports whereby its share price fell to Sh8,970 from Sh11,390 recorded in April, which was about 60 per cent.

Other companies which experienced the fall of share prices during the period were CRDB (From Sh250 to Sh175), DCB (from 430 to Sh395), EABL (Sh6,070 to Sh5,420), KA (Sh140 to Sh100), Swissport (Sh6,350 to Sh3,820), USL (Sh90 to Sh70) and TPCC (Sh2,290 to Sh1,520). TBL had the highest earning per share (eps) at 771.23.

followed by TCC with eps of 686.69 while Swissport had the highest eps of 423.11.