WHILE EVERYONE IS BUSY WITH SPORTS, PETER O'NEILL CONTINUES TO STEAL

by PNGBLOGS

Prime Minister Peter O’Neill’s shady business dealings are heating up as he seeks to hide his massive money-laundering operations and legitimise his wealth.

The latest news from within his Remington group is that he is reviving his satellite communications business, which was a gold mine from inflated Government contract s before he sold it to Digicel a couple of years ago.

Remington has registered two new business names for the satellite subsidiary, B2B Solutions and S2S Solutions, and operations are soon to begin.

His former business, Remington Communications, was secretly sold to Digicel in mid-2013 for between K30 million and K40 million.

The sale to Digicel, is highly suspicious. O’Neill was making a fortune out of the business from fake and/or inflated contracts with Government departments.

For example shortly after he was appointed Treasury and Finance Minister by the Somare Regime in mid-2010, O’Neill secretly ordered the Finance Department to purchase more than 100 satellite dishes, worth a total of approximately K5 million, from Remington Communications.

They were to be installed at Vulupindi Haus and provincial treasuries (at separate cost of several million kina) and operated on a fixed contract. However the system never worked and all the taxpayers’ money spent on it was wasted.

And Peter O’Neill got away with millions.

Digicel quickly discovered that Remington Communications was really not worth a toea, and closed it down after only three years of ownership.

Either Digicel was not prepared to enter into the dirty deals that O’Neill masterminded, or it was not capable of running a satellite business.

But O’Neill, the master of the corrupt contract, knows the value of doing business with his corrupt Government – hence the rebirth of the Remington satellite subsidiary.

One fruitful avenue of new business is through existing Remington contracts in other sectors. For example the Remington IT, Wildcat Developments and SouthWest Air subsidiaries were given corrupt contracts related to the Ok Tedi copper mine immediately after O’Neill nationalised it  in 2013.

Now O’Neill is washing the proceeds of those contracts by selling WildCat and SW Air to his favourite laundryman, Sir Theo Constantinou, in September.

Another potential source of corrupt riches is the proposed start-up of the state-owned DataCo broadband backbone telecommunications network, which will require satellite links in most areas of the country outside the main centres.

DataCo, of course is a State-owned Enterprise, and as such is wide open to corruption. Like all SOEs it will be used as a bottomless pit of cash by O’Neill and his cronies.

O’Neill has already got the inside running on fake and inflated contracts, political donations, bribes and all the rest of his bag of corruption tricks.

At least one director – Kili Richard Tambua – will be on his side. Tambua is one of O’Neill’s Pangia wantoks, and was planted in PNGBC while O’Neill was in charge and robbing the place into bankruptcy.

The rest of the directors are the usual grab-bag of  cronies, time-servers, opportunists and nonentities.

DataCo seems to have been developed with one purpose in mind – to make Peter O’Neill even richer than he already is.

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