Zimbabwe will reconsider legislation aimed at forcing companies to sell more than half of their assets to black investors after the law frightened off investors, acting Prime Minister Thokozani Khupe said.

Minister of Indigenization, Youth Development and Empowerment, Saviour Kasukuwere, and the Minister of Economic Planning and Investment, Elton Mangoma have “now agreed to return to the drawing board,” Khupe said in a copy of a speech posted on the Web site of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai.

Kasukuwere, a member of President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front party, declined to comment by telephone from Harare before hanging up. James Maridadi, Tsvangirai’s spokesman, said the Prime Minister has opposed the laws because they “will achieve the exact opposite of what is intended in Zimbabwe.”

Zimbabwe is attempting to revive its economy after a decade of political turmoil and recession under the leadership of Mugabe, whose Zanu-PF party controlled parliament from independence in 1980 until March 2009, when it lost elections to Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change. Khupe is deputy leader of Tsvangirai’s MDC.

The government will “ensure that any future such policies are based on international best practices and are designed to promote growth, development and empowerment in Zimbabwe,” Khupe said in the text of the speech, delivered at the Harare International Conference yesterday, according to the Web site.

Under the law, companies operating in the country with assets worth more than $500,000, including Anglo American Plc and Old Mutual Plc, must sell 51 percent of their local units to black investors within five years, according to a copy of the law that was distributed by Harare-based Veritas Trust Feb. 9. The so-called Indigenization and Empowerment Act was passed by parliament in 2008. It stipulates prison sentences of as many as five years for non-compliance.

Zimbabwe has the world’s second-largest reserves of platinum and chrome, after South Africa, and also has deposits of gold, coal, diamonds and nickel.

By Bloomberg