PM EXPOSED WITH BIG HOLES IN THE 2015 NATIONAL BUDGET
The Prime Minister’s economic and financial madness and stupidity have been exposed again by holes in the 2014 Supplementary Budget and the 2015 Budget. It is painfully obvious that both Budgets are already unravelling, within a week of being handed down. The cost to innocent hard-working Papua New Guineans - people unlike the Prime Minister and his konmen cronies - is likely to be very high. The profits will flow to the konman PM and his cronies and no one else.
The cost of living will soar above even the current high levels, the value of the kina will continue to plunge, unemployment will keep on rising, and incomes falling. Poor people - the great majority of the people in settlements, rural towns and villages - will suffer the most from Mr O’Neill’s Budgets for the criminal elite like his cabinet colleagues and silent, secret partners in big business.
Hidden away in the detail of the 2014 Supplementary Budget and the 2015 Budget are a number of time-bombs ticking away that could cause further serious damage to the nation’s finances and the economy. As always with the current Prime Minister, some of them may involve breaches of the law. Others are the usual smoke and mirror tricks that this Prime Minister often uses to fool the long-suffering public.
For example the budgets are projecting the receipt of significant funds from dividends to be paid by State Owned Enterprises. The National Petroleum Company of PNG, is expected to pay a dividend of K450 million. But where is this money to come from? It would be wise for the authorities such as the police, the Auditor-General and the Ombudsman Commission to investigate a $170million loan recently taken out by NPCP from the ANZ, a bank which is a partner in an increasing number of the Prime Minister’s shady schemes.
The Prime Minister has many questions to answer about this money, which has been loaned against future NPCP ash flows. The most important question is whether NPCP is paying its dividends to the State out of the loan. If it is doing so, it is breaking the law. Dividends must be paid out of operating funds. The authorities need to investigate whether NPCP board members and management were involved in the declaration and payment of dividends out of the proceeds of this highly suspicious ANZ loan.
The authorities should also investigate the dividend arrangements for MVIL, which is due to pay K125 million in total to the State for both Budgets. Once again the dividends declared must be paid out of operating funds - MVIL’s income. It most certainly cannot come, for example, from the Third Party Insurance Trust that it manages and from which it receives a small management fee of less than 5% a year. Trust funds may only be used to pay third-party insurance claims. An investigation must be held into whether MVIL directors and management have played any role in the illegal payment of dividends out of the MVIL trust funds.
Ok Tedi Mining Limited is also projected to pay a dividend in the 2014 Supplementary Budget of K119 million - but there is a legal dispute over ownership of the 63.4% shareholding in the company expropriated from PNGSDP, and it is likely that the dividend will have to be placed in an escrow account, where it will not be available to the Government.
The big question, of course, is why no dividend has been listed for Oil Search, in which the State recently illegally borrowed K3 billion from UBS to buy a 10% shareholding? The Prime Minister, who has been referred to a Leadership Tribunal over his role in this illegal loan, has been boasting how good the deal was for PNG. Yet the people of PNG are not going to receive one toea in dividends. How is that good for the people of PNG, Prime Minister?
The Budget papers also show that the Government expects to receive K2.5 billion from landowners to pay for their 4.6% share of the PNG NG project. The 4.6% for landowners in the project is inbuilt and paid for by the State out of the original IPIC loan. Most analysts agree that, knowing landowners in the project area, and the corruptness of the O’Neill Government, the State will be lucky to receive even half of that amount.
Finally, a number of authoritative posts on social media have reported that 2015 budget revenue figures have been cooked by the Prime Minister. Treasury sources have said that the revenue figure of K16 billion is overstated by about K3 billion, potentially leaving another enormous deficit to be paid for by the suffering of ordinary PNG people.
It’s no wonder the Prime Minister would not table all the Budget documents on Budget day or provide them to the Budget lock-up. He has too much to hide.
