Prime Minister Peter O’Neill needs to come clean on his proposals relating to the financing of landowners’ promised 4.27 percent equity in the PNG LNG project. A report on social media this morning makes extraordinary claims, backed up by a purported NEC submission, that the O’Neill Government is about to break its financing promise to landowners and other members of the PNG LNG Beneficiary Group. “Mr O’Neill should tell the people the truth about the proposals contained in the purported submission,” former Prime Minister Sir Mekere Morauta said. “If the report is true, Mr O’Neill should immediately withdraw the submission and re-think his approach to the equity issue. “A firm agreement was
The Supreme Court has set 1 July as the date for a hearing on the right of Sir Mekere Morauta to challenge the constitutionality of the O’Neill Government’s illegal expropriation of PNG Sustainable Development Program Ltd”s 63.4 percent shareholding in Ok Tedi Mining Ltd. Sir Mekere is seeking standing to bring the challenge as a private citizen – former Prime Minister and senior public servant, businessman, economist, chairman of PNGSDP and former chairman of OTML. He announced in January 2016 that he had begun new legal proceedings seeking to have the Mining (Ok Tedi Tenth Supplemental Agreement) Act 2013 declared unconstitutional and invalid. Should the Court declare that Sir Mekere has s
The O’Neill Government’s political interference in the Bank of Papua New Guinea is threatening the stability of the nation’s financial system and state finances, and increasing risks for bank depositors and investors in financial institutions, former Prime Minister Sir Mekere Morauta said today. The central bank, the nation’s premier financial institution, is supposed to be the independent watchdog that supervises the system and ensures that risks are kept to a minimum, he said. One of the reforms my Government introduced was to strengthen the independence and the watch-dog role of the Bank of Papua New Guinea, setting clear prudential guidelines and assigning it the additional role of super