CHAIRMAN and Chief Commissioner of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the UBS loan transaction, Sir Salamo Injia has told the UBS inquiry on Tuesday that the Commission is more interested in any documents and information that may have been supplied on request by IPBC or Kumul Consolidated Limited (KCL) by the Kumul Petroleum Holdings Limited (KPHL).
Sir Salamo said that the management of the UBS loan is a concern.
He said the process in terms of selling the Oil Search shares and report of financial statements concerning the flow of revenue from the PNG LNG project to Kumul Consolidated Holdings or IPBC, in terms of how the revenue from PNG LNG project was being managed by Kumul Petroleum Holdings to pay the loan eventually when the Oil search shares were sold needs to be made clear.
The inquiry on Monday, July 26 when responding to affidavit presented by the former Minister for Treasury Patrick Pruaitch, has urged KPHL to provide a financial record and financial transaction informing the commission on the total proceeds receive from the LNG project.
Mr. Pruaitch told the COI that KPHL should be the leading transparent State entity that should produce annual reports for the revenue made and spent.
He further explained that KPHL represents the people of PNG through its respective leaders in parliament and therefore an annual report should be published for parliament to have a say on how much money the state has been making and how much that has been lost.
“Firstly they need to publicise their annual reports because that is where public can scrutinize the dealing in terms of how they used the money. This money is not private money,” Pruaitch told the inquiry.
Mr. Pruaitch added that the money is owned by Papua New Guineans and if they publish the annual report than people of the country would be able to see how they are spending the money.
He said the report would then be provided to the responsible minister who then brings it to parliament for members to review and comment and in fact debate should have taken if the report is presented annually to parliament.
Pruaitch said the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) can then review the activities and expenditure of government institutions including KPHL.
However, he said recently they have passed an Act of Parliament to prevent PAC from having access to the information.
Meanwhile, the KCH General Council Erastus Kamburi who appeared before the COI was asked to provide necessary documents and transactions involved during the transfer of shares from IPBC to KCH.
Mr. Kamburi told the Inquiry that KCH has nothing or had no resolution of what was happening when the transfer of shares took place.
“I’ve been able to try look into records that we have. If there was any transaction occurred in that regard and I was advised by our Chief Financial Officer that there were no transaction on record of money coming in into the General Business Trust as the result of that transaction,” he said.
Mr. Kamburi was not able to present the necessary documents as expected by the Commission. However, he will appear before the Commission next Wednesday, August 4 to present the documents as requested by the Commission.
KCH is the entity which holds in trust, the government’s non-petroleum and non-miming assets. KCH (formerly known as IPBC) was established in July 2002 under the Independent Public Business Corporation of PNG Act 2002 (the IPBC Act).