Cameroonian media mogul Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga’s Anecdote Group pays $3.2 million to tax authority

L’Anecdote Group (Anecdote Group), a Cameroonian conglomerate led by leading media mogul Jean-Pierre Amougou Belinga, has paid the country’s tax authorities a total of CFA1.7 billion ($3.2 million), representing a fraction of its outstanding tax obligation.

The payment comes nearly a month after its CEO’s bank account was seized over the group’s failure to offset tax debt totaling CFA15 billion ($24.1 million), a dispute that escalated into an open conflict.

Belinga, the CEO of Anecdote Group, also runs Pura, a mineral water company, and Vision 4, a Cameroonian TV channel.

According to a press release issued by his spokesperson Ines Arielle Belinga, the businessman has always met his tax obligations, having paid the Cameroonian tax authorities CFA600 million ($966,000) in taxes at the start of this year.

In 2021, Cameroon’s National Agency for Financial Investigation, the body in charge of financial intelligence, sent a list of companies to the Directorate General of Taxes (DGI), whose volume of financial transactions had piqued its interest.

The DGI initiated a compliance check with the Tax Department in response to the list, with two tax divisions assigned to the task based on the geographical distribution of the companies involved.

After the compliance check, the first division determined that some of the companies involved owed more than CFA18 billion ($29 million), while the second estimated the tax debt of the remaining companies to be CFA12 billion ($19.3 million), bringing the total to CFA30 billion ($48.3 million).