Secret Strategic Plan-How Peter O’Neil Intends To Win Against PNG’s Corruption Fighters
This is a compilation of many conversations I have had over at least a year. Some of the following information came from private discussions with staff working in the Prime Minister’s office. The PM’s office does not have the PM’s most trusted allies, but those allies still talk, and some of that talk ends up hitting the ears of those inside the PM’s office, which of course include his media unit. By the way, even the PM’s legal defence talks after hours and some information came from legal sources assisting the PM’s defence.
From all these conversations, I have put together an overall plan our Prime Minister seems to be using to worm his way out of all the current scandals that surround him. He probably doesn’t much care whether everyone knows about his plan or not. As we all know, as a people there are hardly any activists amongst us. From the bottom to the top, nearly everyone is ignorant of what government does or how it is structured. Most rarely see a newspaper, much less read the papers every day. Our newspapers leave much to be desired in accuracy and coverage. Very few people have time, money, and access to newspapers and internet to keep track what is going on. Thus, in the end, the fight against corruption will probably boil down to a few committed government bureaucrats that until now the PM has been able to easily defeat through intimidation or sacking.
This compilation contains all the strategies I have been told about which the informants say are being used by the PM or planned. Starting with current strategies, ending with emergency ones:
1. Counter each statement by anticorruption forces with a misinformation counter statement. The purpose of this is to confuse the public so much that they finally give up trying to figure out what the truth might be. A disinterested public is the PM’s goal because it assures that he will not have to face a people power movement.
2. Convince citizens that an arrest is the same as a conviction and is unbecoming of a national leader in today’s world.
This strategy has been in effect for weeks now. Every time things get hot, O’Neil makes a statement that an arrest is highly unusual and improper and destroys the PM’s ability to make progress. Right now in PNG, most citizens who know anything at all about the current court circus believe that arresting Peter O’Neil is the same as charging him and that conviction is a foregone conclusion. Many of these misinformed souls will proceed to conclude that the whole process of arresting the PM is purely political and stacked against Peter O’Neil by his enemies. This sentiment works brilliantly in O’Neil’s favour. The strategy is already working.
3. Help reinforce the message that an accused is innocent until proven guilty:
Being a true statement, it is especially easy for Peter O’Neil to work it to his advantage. Those who accept on face value the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” will also accept the accused mounting endless court challenges, since they haven’t yet been proven guilty. O’Neil has planted allies in social media to bring up the “innocent until proven guilty” statement as needed to obstruct the building of any effective movement against the PM. This strategy is working.
4. Create a defence ring of paid loyalists:
This is now in place. After some mistakes chosing the right man to protect him, Geoffrey Vaki proved an excellent choice. Vaki is so effective that it has allowed O’Neil to end his court challenges and relax. Vaki will keep the arresting cops away from O’Neil and O’Neil’s cronies. O’Neil has now appointed a third ombudsman (acting) who can obstruct investigations in that unit. In other words, O’Neil’s paid loyalists are activists and are expected to circumvent justice at all levels of the justice system, including the ombudsman. This strategy is working.
5. Use middlemen as smokescreens to confuse investigators:
Related to the above, Peter O’Neil has always been very smart and cunning in protecting himself using middlemen. He has middlemen briefcase carriers, middlemen bribe and kickback takers, and middlemen who pose as owners of O’Neil properties. All get paid handsomely for being front people and they are all aware that if they dare give away the secret their handsome pay stops and there will be hell to pay. There are no turncoats as of yet. Through this strategy, O’Neil has gained a majority ownership of PNG pokies which followed his success at restricting pokies licensing. This strategy has worked for a long time.
6. Keep direct evidence scarce and extremely hard to uncover:
This has been standard Peter O’Neil operating procedure, just as it is for the most crafty of PNG’s white collar criminals. Deals are never put down on paper, bank transfer instructions are given verbally, and overseas banks are used to launder money, often using accounts in the names of Peter O’Neil’s trusted middlemen loyalists. Unlike in develop countries, there is no FBI type institution that can secretly tap the phones of the corrupt and gather evidence, thus the evidence is never collected, much less available to use in court. Money and capacity limitations in the recent Task Force as well as the ombudsman’s office makes finding the limited evidence that is present almost impossible to uncover. This reduces the Ombudsman and Task Force to building a conviction based on circumstantial evidence. While circumstantial evidence can successfully convict a defendant, the degree of certainty of the evidence is weaker than with direct evidence. Peter O’Neil plans to use high priced lawyers who are masters at confusing magistrates to challenge the circumstantial evidence that currently dominates the Parakagate scandal, in order to get O’Neil off the hook. This strategy has been ongoing, but the strategy to overcome circumstantial evidence is still in the planning stage. 7. Behind the scenes destruction of evidence: Files with potential evidence are disappearing as we speak. Disappearing evidence has long been a successful strategy of the corrupt to subvert justice and be cleared innocent in court cases. The recent attempts to secure and destroy evidence held by the police and ombudsman have been publicised, but hardly any of the public knows about these incidents because they haven’t appeared in the newspapers. When intimidation doesn’t work, O’Neil in the past has used bribes. When bribes don’t work, mysterious fires may succeed in destroying evidence. Those fires never get traced back to the true culprits and have been used extensively over the years to get rid of evidence. Right now, O’Neil is using his defence ring of loyalists to try to obtain evidence that later can be destroyed. Ongoing strategy, but in its early stages.
8. Buy the silence of government MPs:
Peter O’Neil is the most successful PM in history to essentially buy a parliament. His winning strategy are the district support grants, which are delivered on time and in full to all MPs in his government. The K10 million annually for each district is place in the MPs hands. All this money allows the MPs in O’Neil’s government to stay busy, spend the money in corrupt and noncorrupt ways to build up their own political support back home, and not be held accountable for how the money is used. Whether they like the PM or not, virtually no MPs in Peter O’Neil’s camp dares to risk damaging the current money pipelines. This is a brilliant strategy that O’Neil started during the 2012 election with his K500 supplementary budget monies, and plans to improve and make more sustainable using the Ok Tedi revenue he is grabbing away from PNG Sustainable Development Foundation that Mekere Morauta was a director of.
9. Submit endless court appeals and create other time wasters:
Very few citizens know that one of the basic rights guaranteed an effective justice system is that all accused be guaranteed a speedy trial. However, speedy trials are not forced if the accused do not want it, and defendants around the world have used trial delaying tactics to fade memories of witnesses, amongst other things.
Peter O’Neil believes in the general value of time delays, not only for investigations seeking to bring him to justice, but for anything associated with allegations being made against him. For example, with each passing day, there are fewer negative revelations remaining to hit the front page news. All those who have ratted on the PM have told the public or investigators everything they know. As the news fades, citizen interest in Parakagate goes down and their motivation in demanding justice fades. University students become tired of the need for constant struggle and give up. All this gives O’Neil’s media unit an opening to exploit. When the heat goes down in another month or two, they plan to begin a heavy promotion of Peter O’Neil’s “accomplishments”. They also intend to plant more comments on the social media do saboutage the anticorruption activists. Those activists will find fewer people coming to their defence as interest in O’Neil’s transgressions continues to fade.
10. Plausable deniability:
This is a long standing O’Neil strategy that is a universal legal defense ploy that improves his chances of being declared innocent in anything he might be charged of. O’Neil uses this on a daily basis, the main slips having been when he was under the influence of alcohol. Plausible deniability is created when a defendant can convince the judge that there is not one, but two or more plausible explanations to explain something. This effectively muddies the waters and greatly increases the chances of a defendant being declared innocent.
11. Buying off the court case:
This is a set of strategies often practiced by PNG’s white collar criminals in the past but they work mostly in low profile cases where the magistrate is bought off at the same time as another participant in the court case. The easiest way to throw a case in PNG and subvert justice is to pay the police to lose evidence. It also seems to be easy to intimidate or pay off a witness not to show up in court or to get them to change their story. More difficult it to pay off a prosecuting lawyer not to show up but in a high profile case this is made very difficult by the publicity and a magistrate will be pressured to adjourn court until the lawyer shows up. Informants tell me that Peter O’Neil bought off the court to win his NPF corruption case but no one I have met has been able to tell me exactly how he did it. Close sources have said that this strategy overall is for emergency use only because any court case against the PM will be high profile and closely scrutinised. However, the fact that Geoffrey Vaki has been willing for a price to suffer damage to his reputation in order to protect the PM means that for a bribe going into the millions, our PM may be able to find a magistrate who is willing to use a judicial maneuver to dismiss the case and declare Peter O’Neil innocent.
