Equity Group to pay KRA $91.6 million as corporate taxes in 9M 2022

Equity Group Holdings, a leading financial services group led by Kenyan banking magnate James Mwangi, is expected to pay the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) a total of Ksh11.24 billion ($91.6 million) in corporate tax from its operations in the first nine months of 2022.

Equity Group is the largest financial services conglomerate in East Africa, with subsidiaries in Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in addition to its extensive operations in Kenya.

The company’s corporate income tax expense for the six-month period ending June 30 was Ksh11.24 billion ($91.6 million), according to recently released financial results. This is 28.3-percent more than the Ksh8.76 billion ($71.4 million) tax charge paid to the KRA in the first nine months of 2021.

The $91-million income tax charge is more than 25.4 percent of its pre-tax earnings of Ksh44.3 billion ($361 million) in the first nine months of the year, and about 99 percent of its total tax charge of Ksh11.4 billion ($92.8 million) in 2021, when its pre-tax earnings surpassed Ksh50 billion ($410 million).

With corporate taxes closely linked to profitability, the double-digit increase in Equity Group’s tax charge in the first nine months of 2022 was driven by a 28-percent increase in the group’s profit from Ksh26.9 billion ($220.1 million) during the same period of 2021 to Ksh34.4 billion ($281.5 million) in the period ending Sept. 30.

As a result of the strong performance, the group’s assets increased by 15 percent to Ksh1.36 trillion ($11.1 billion), led by a 15-percent growth in client deposits, which surpassed Ksh1 trillion ($8.1 billion) for the first time in the group’s history.