Value Added Tax Regulations (No. 70)

The Minister of Finance has made a substantial amendment to the First Schedule of the Value Added Tax (General) Regulations, 2003 (S.I. 273 of 2003), which lists exempt supplies.

Three new items go into Part I. Pipeline transportation, handling and storage services supplied by the National Oil Infrastructure Company of Zimbabwe for delivering petroleum products are exempt with effect from 1 January 2024. Live cattle, pigs, goats and sheep and bovine semen are exempt, as are poultry meat and kapenta. Paragraphs 8 and 9 of Part I are also recast so that unmanufactured tobacco is dealt with in two limbs — tobacco supplied on the auction floors under the Tobacco Industry and Marketing Act, and other unmanufactured tobacco not sold on the auction floor.

In Part II, the tariff detail is reworked. Heading 84.32 (agricultural, horticultural and forestry machinery for soil preparation or cultivation) is restated with commodity code 8432.80.10 excluded. Paragraph 6 is replaced with a table of tobacco commodity codes — flue-cured Virginia (2401.10.10), burley (2401.10.20), dark fired (2401.10.30), oriental (2401.10.40), sun cured (2401.10.50) and other (2401.10.90). Paragraph 7 is amended to list berries and other fruit under heading 08.10, and to insert live bovine, swine, sheep and goats (01.02 to 01.04), a long run of poultry meat codes under 02.07, dried freshwater fish (0305.59.10), bovine semen (0511.10.00) and 07.01.90.00.

A new paragraph 12, with effect from 9 February 2024, exempts a list of disability and assistive goods: braille books, newspapers and other braille publications, mobility white canes, braille computer terminals, steering components adapted for disabled drivers, carriages for disabled persons, contact lenses and corrective refractive lenses, spectacle frames and mountings for corrective lenses, corrective sunglasses, orthopaedic appliances, crutches, splints, artificial body parts and hearing aids, and braille watches.

Finally, the instrument backdates its predecessor: the Value Added Tax (General) (Amendment) Regulations, 2024 (No. 69), published in S.I. 105 of 2024, are deemed effective from 1 January 2024.

Two cautions. Paragraph 6 of the instrument removes certain commodity codes from Part II paragraph 7, but that short list came through the extraction garbled and is not legible, so the codes being removed must be read in the Gazette itself. The replacement tobacco table also carries what looks like a stray line, code 8424.82.00 "Agricultural or horticultural", sitting inside a tobacco heading. And apart from the dated provisions noted above, the instrument states no general commencement date.