Judgment No. 23/18
Civil Appeal No. SC 145/15
or extinguished the debt. By virtue of section 30 of the Act, the appellant was obliged, as payer,
to withhold tax on the fees and charges.
It was further submitted that in so far as the Sunfresh case determined that the
originating cause of the fees paid to the non-resident was not Zimbabwe, that case was wrongly
decided. The respondent referred this Court to the decision of the High Court in Zimasco Ltd
v Commissioner-General of the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority8 which it urged us to accept as
the correct exposition of the law.
[26]
In the Zimasco case the fees were for service rendered by a foreign agent to a local
safari operator. The High Court held that the originating cause of the fees was in Zimbabwe
and that withholding tax was payable by the local safari operator. At page 3 of the judgment
the learned Judge said the following:
“the appellant disputes that the source of the commission is from within Zimbabwe and
seeks to rely for that proposition on the decision in Sunfresh Enterprises (Pvt) Ltd t/a
Bulembi Safaris v Zimra 2004 (1)ZLR 506 (H). In that case Cheda J held inter alia that
payment of a commission by a foreign client to a foreign marketing agent of a local
safari operator outside the country did not under para 1(1) of the 17 th Schedule of the
Income Tax Act constitute payment of fees from within Zimbabwe even though the
originating cause was the safari operation in Zimbabwe. In my view, however, the facts
in this case are distinguishable from those in the Sunfresh decision. In casu, the
appellant clearly qualifies as the “payer”, i.e., “any person who or partnership which
pays or is responsible for the payment of fees…” and is ordinarily resident in
Zimbabwe, whereas in Sunfresh the payment of fees or commission was ostensibly
done by foreign clients to a foreign marketing agent.”
On the interpretation of ‘fees’ as set out in the 17 th Schedule, the Court ruled:
“The respondent submitted that the words “any amount” above give a broad definition
to the term fees and contended that money paid as commission could be regarded as
“any amount” for the purposes of s 1(1) of the 17th Schedule. In my view, the
respondent was correct in its interpretation of the words “any amount” to include
commission. From the above definition, it is clear that the legislature intended “fees”
to cover any sum of money, by whatever name called, paid for services rendered of a
8
HH 149-16
13
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