MICHAEL SOMARE'S BOMBSHELL SINGAPORE KICKBACK PAYMENT IS JUST THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG IN PNG'S GANG OF HYPOCRITE PM THIEVES

by HARDI NII WOO
Yesterday Peter O'Neill was pointing fingers and calling Somare and Mekere Morauta hypocrites for calling Peter O'Neill a thief. Yes, indeed they are, but that doesn't mean Peter O'Neill isn't every bit the thief like the other former Prime Ministers, with super rich Julius Chan and Paias Wingti known or alleged to have gotten rich off various schemes and scams for many years while they've held political power.
Peter O'Neill should take his own advice: Only those with clean hands should point fingers. O'Neill's fingers smell like pekpek, yet once again our current alleged alleged alleged alleged alleged crook in power proclaims himself as being holier than everyone else.
Our PM once again hides behind the "innocent until proven guilty" constitutional protection. "Innocent until proven guilty" only has credibility in countries where public servant investigators and prosecutors well enough resourced that they are able to pinpoint nearly all of the guilty. In PNG, the 29th most corrupt country in the world (out of more than 200 countries), nearly all the guilty go free. Thus, the unconvicted are a mixed bag of thieves and non thieves. The thieves proudly hide amongst the non thieves and declare themselves innocent as a result. What a joke.
Michael Somare's own Chris Hawkins style propagandist is the inifinitely grumpy faced Betha Somare, the Grand Thief's daughter. Betha is forever defending her father and family, saying that all the houses they own in Cairns were obtained by hard work and saving a modest public paycheque. What exactly is Betha Somare saying now? The Somare name, which has been getting dirtier by the year, now thoroughly stinks as badly as the O'Neill, the Wingti, the Somare, and the Skate names. While Mekere Morauta is hardly squeeky clean when it comes to corruption, it is idiotic for Peter O'Neill to accuse Morauta's high class living off of Ok Tedi Sustainable Development Money (which we will not refute) as being responsible for the needless deaths through poor medical care in Western Province.
Health care and preventing needless death through preventable illness is supposed to be the government's job, not Ok Tedi's or any sustainable development fund's responsibility. Before this current supplementary budget showed how little money the O'Neill government wants to spend on health care, health care expenditures had been cut an astounding 46% between 2014 and 2016. How do people live under that kind of budget, Peter O'Neill?
Peter O'Neill's endless lies and deceptions aside, what is the latest Somare scam all about?
It is about millions of kina of our tax money that was supposed to be allocated to build 15 community colleges.
Have you seen any new community colleges popping up in PNG in your memory? Of course not, but money was allocated during the 10 year Somare dictatorship for that purpose.
What happened to all that money? We the people don't know but thanks to Singapore investigators, we now have one small part of the answer.
As usual a trust fund (always easy to steal from) had been set up to store the money, instead of paying for expenses from normal budgetary cycles and requisitions from that budget. An American by the name of Thomas Doehrman was named as trustee of the K156 million fund. Most of the fund monies came from the National Budget (K56 million), Chinese Exim bank loan monies (K80 million).
In June 2010 the trust hired the international telecommunications company ZTE Corporation for USD $35 million to supply telecom equipment for the community college project. The contract was supposedly for only USD $10 million at first, but then became steadily inflated.
With that inflated contract as bait, Trustee Doehrman made a corrupt deal with a ZTE employee by the name of Li Weiming for a secret kickback to be paid to Doehrman and his wife, Lim Ai Wah. Lim and Doehrman acquired a British Virgin Islands shelf company by the name of Questzone Offshore to hold the kickback money in.
To get the kickback, Questzone Offshore created a fake invoice and contract with ZTE in 2010 but delivered no services or products. Payment was made to Questzone and for his role in the deal, ZTE employee Li was paid USD $850,000 into his wife's Hong Kong account.
Lim then paid 3 cheques from Questzone Offshore totallying USD $784,000 into Michael Somare's account in Singapore. Supposedly this money was to be used to buy the houses in Cairns owned by Michael Somare and son Arthur. Corrupt Trustee Doerhman's wife's sworn statements include these (from Susan Merrell's article):
"I wish to state that the 3 payments labelled ‘Housing’…were made for the purpose of helping PM PNG to pay for his house and his son to pay for a separate house…Hence the US$280,000 and US$224.000…were meant for the PM PNG’s use of housing loans."
"Sometime in 2010, I received a call from the son of PM PNG asking me to send money to him. I told him the amount set aside for him was US$280,000 but since he did not have an account in Singapore, I wrote a cheque to PM PNGs bank account and told him to pass the money to his son…”
And the sworn statement of all from Lim Ai Wah:
"if you don’t pay to the PM PNG you will not be able to get business from PNG."
Tru tru tru. Always was, still is. Somare, Chan, Wingti, Skate, O'Neill. Part of the same "looseknit mafia of thieves" (see: http://www.pngblogs.com/…/the-germination-and-spread-of.html).
This latest Somare scandal (there have been many over the years) actually broke open and the charges were filed in Singapore 3 years ago (http://news.asiaone.com/…/Crime/Story/A1Story20130402-41299…) but at the time, all lips were zipped as to who was the beneficiary of the kickback.
In April of this year, Susan Merrell came out with the story and what was known about it then (http://www.pngecho.com/…/corruption-somares-blueprint-koim…/). Already, Grand Thief Somare's involvement was known and it was clear that Sam Koim and his anticorruption Task Force knew all this too, but wasn't mentioning it, quite possibly because the corruption investigation was ongoing in Singapore.
Yesterday when the Strait Times news of Singapore (a near dictatorship itself) they tried to hide our former Grand Thief's name within the article so it was not clear. Ha ha ha it's come out anyway.
This is life at the top. One theft after another. Peter O'Neill is of course, trying to separate himself from the other corrupt PMs of PNG but going around tendering processes, as occurred with the ZTC contract described here, was also done by Peter O'Neill in the purchase of the 2 General Electric generators, suspiciously bought through the LR Group of Israel. Kickbacks? Who doesn't get kickbacks at the top these days?
Massive thievery that impoverishes our people and ranks our country as the laughingstock 29th most corrupt country in the world means absolutely nothing to our high level thieves and former/present Prime Ministers. They can (if not already) move to Australia and tell everyone down there that they left because they couldn't stand the corruption in PNG.
Michael Somare is a scumbag of the lowest order because he took the incredible trust of the people of PNG and betrayed it.
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Here are some links to original articles of the Somare kickback:
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