Day one:Charges against Sir Michael to be presented
PRIME Minister Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare will appear before a leadership tribunal today, charged with misconduct in office, The National reports.
The three overseas judges, appointed to sit in the tribunal, arrived yesterday from Australia and were sworn in by the Governor-General, Michael Ogio.
A master tactician and survivor of PNG’s rough and tumble political field for 43 years, Sir Michael has decided not to go down without a fight.
His lawyers filed an urgent application on Tuesday to stop the tribunal from convening until the Supreme Court had decided on a matter before it which challenges the validity of his (PM’s) referral for prosecution before a leadership tribunal.
All eyes will be focused on a small band of lawyers from the office of the public prosecutor who will set the ball rolling today, unless the tribunal decided otherwise, by reading the charges for which Sir Michael has been referred.
It is expected that immediately after the statement of reasons are given, the prosecuting team will move for the tribunal to suspend the prime minister from office.
As the prime minister prepares to face the tribunal, PNG grew eerily quiet yesterday.
His ruling National Alliance party met for a full week to discuss, among other things, candidates who were to succeed him as parliamentary leader and a cabinet line-up after him to lead government into next year’s elections.
When the party machinery met with stony silence from the prime minister, it stopped meeting and it, too, fell silent.
Coalition partners and ministers, likewise, fell silent, stricken by the gravity of what is to transpire today.
Even the opposition, which has pushed for Sir Michael to resign all along, seemed stumped by the occasion. No vitriolic statement came.
It seemed as if the nation is holding its breath.
Sir Michael, 75, is the first prime minister to face a leadership tribunal out of five former colleagues.
The prime minister has been charged with failing to file his annual returns to the Ombudsman Commission between 1994 and 1997.
A court official said entry to the tribunal room (courtroom one) would be strictly controlled and unauthorised persons would not be allowed to enter.
The partitioned courtroom can sit only 150 or so people.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
Aini blasts absentees
PUBLIC Accounts Committee (PAC) chairman Martin Aini expressed frustration over Finance and Treasury’s Gabriel Yer and Simon Tosali’s unavailability at an inquiry yesterday, The National reports.
Aini also raised dissatisfaction over the non-attendance National Housing Corporation (NHC) acting managing director Tarcissius Muganaua.
“If he does not appear during the inquiry tomorrow (today), the PAC will issue a warrant of arrest on him,” Aini said of Muganaua.
It was revealed that the PAC wrote to Muganaua last Oct 20 seeking information on the transfer of section 41 lot 57 in Boroko.
This was one of dozens of complaints received by the PAC from frustrated buyers who had paid for their homes years ago but had not received the titles.
“We chose this case at random but were surprised to find that even though the house had been paid in full, the NHC advertised the property for sale and the owners were threatened by supposed buyers and accompanying police with eviction notices.
“We sought information from you but you have ignored the letters. Why? We now serve you with a notice to produce the information.
“We want a full explanation in seven days and a firm timetable for transfer of the property, which should have been done years ago,” the chairman said.
Aini urged Yer and Tosali to be present during today’s session to respond to issues relating to their department.
This year’s PAC held its first sitting yesterday at parliament, holding an inquiry into the funding of health and hospital services in PNG.
The inquiry was also attended by other PAC members including Wewak MP Dr Moses Manwau (deputy chairman), Bulolo MP Sam Basil, Gazelle MP Malakai Tabar, Markham MP Koni Iguan and deputy speaker Francis Marus.
The main areas inquired into included health management in the
The inquiry ended last Dec 15 and started yesterday.
The PAC intends to resume the inquiry in late March to take evidence from Nonga and Angau hospitals, as well as the Morobe health office and
The PAC intends to conduct an inquiry into the Enga children’s trust fund, as well as into four provincial governments in Northern, West New Britain, East Sepik and
“The secretariat will issue and serve the necessary paperwork and prepare the inquiry for next month,” the PAC stated.
The PAC adjourned to 10am today, in which it is expected to bring before its presence the worst performing government institutions that have been identified to explain to the committee why they are unable to improve their performance.
Tamate to prosecute until next Thursday
By JULIA DAIA BORE
ACTING Public Prosecutor Jim Wala Tamate will officially vacate his acting position of two years next Thursday, The National reports.
He will be replaced on the same day by his successor, Camillus Sambua, a senior lawyer who had worked with the public prosecutor’s office for a number of years.
The official gazettal notice of the appointment of Sambua as acting public prosecutor and revocation of Tamate appeared in last Thursday’s gazettal No. G58, dated March 3.
This meant that Tamate would act in the position until next Thursday.
He is also expected to attend the start of the leadership tribunal tomorrow when the prosecution lawyer will deliver the charges of misconduct in office against Prime Minister Sir Michael Somare.
The prime minister has been charged with failing to file his annual returns to the Ombudsman Commission between 1994 and 1997.
All three members of the tribunal, ex-judges of the common law jurisdiction from abroad, are expected in the country today.
They will be sworn into office by the governor-general to take up their posts as members of the leadership tribunal.
Tamate told The National yesterday that due to the controversy over his revocation as chief public prosecutor, it was agreed that another senior prosecutor within the office would take the leading role at the tribunal.
He said that agreement would also affect Sambua.
Long-serving senior public prosecutor Kaluwin Pondros has been tasked the job as leading prosecutor at the tribunal.
Prime minister attempts to stop tribunal
PRIME Minister Sir Michael Somare yesterday filed an urgent application to stop the leadership tribunal from convening tomorrow to hear allegations of misconduct in office against him, The National reports.
The application was filed yesterday by the prime minister’s legal team, headed by overseas counsel Ian Molloy.
Documents relating to the application were then immediately served on the Ombudsman Commission and the public prosecutor’s office yesterday afternoon.
Acting Public Prosecutor Jim Wala Tamate had confirmed receiving the documents.
Although removed as the public prosecutor, he would remain in office until March 17 and may have a last say in appointing the leading prosecuting lawyer for the case.
Tamate said the office would support the ombudsman and fight the application when the tribunal starts its session tomorrow.
Tamate said a team of public prosecutors, headed by senior prosecutor Kaluwin Pondros, was ready to present to the tribunal its case relating to the allegations that Sir Michael had failed to report on his annual returns for a specified period.
Yesterday’s application was to stop the tribunal from proceeding until a Supreme Court application (of the originating summons) filed last Saturday, questioning the constitutionality of the Ombudsman Commission’s referral of Sir Michael to the public prosecutor, was heard and ruled upon.
The matter came before Chief Justice Sir Salamo Injia on Monday and was adjourned to next Monday.
In his original originating summons of October 2008, the prime minister had alleged that former chief ombudsman Ila Geno had made certain important decisions concerning him and his referral without involving a properly constituted quorum (meeting) of the commissioners as required by the Organic Law.
Meanwhile, all three members of the tribunal are expected to fly into
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Back to that gold in the PNG hills
By Barry FitzGerald in Business Day
March 7, 2011
There's plenty of potential in picking up where the Mount Kare alluvial gold rush left off.
IT HAS been a case of back to the future for Stephen Promnitz, chief executive of the south-east Asia and south-west Pacific copper-gold explorer Indochine Mining (ASX: IDC). Indochine raised $20 million in its December float on the strength of a big copper-gold exploration tenement package in little-explored Cambodia as its main go.
The float attracted the backing of the mighty fund manager BlackRock and hedge fund Och-Ziff as substantial shareholders, with holdings of 7 per cent and 14 per cent respectively. Drilling gets under way at the Cambodia properties later this year, but in the meantime Promnitz has secured an option for Indochine over the Mount Kare gold project in Papua New Guinea.
As a young geologist with CRA (since merged with Rio Tinto), Promnitz witnessed at Mount Kare one of the great alluvial gold rushes of the modern era.
The 1988-89 rush left an impression.
''It was the most astounding thing I have ever seen,'' Promnitz told Garimpeiro.
''There was more gold than you could poke a stick at. So much so that I thought I would never be looking for gold again.
''The locals were shaking gold nuggets from the roots of the grass. Some of the nuggets were the size of goose eggs. It was on for young and old.
''We saw the place go from having nobody there to having more than 6000 people with picks and shovels in the space of six weeks.''
Gold was well understood in the region, given Barrick's 25-million-ounce Porgera deposit some 20 kilometres away. Porgera hadn't been developed by then but it had been a gold exploration project for 30 years. What eventually got Porgera into production was the discovery there of Zone 7, with its amazing grade of 40 grams of gold a tonne.
In the end, the locals who swarmed onto the alluvial patch at Mount Kare plucked more than 1 million ounces of gold from thick, sticky clay. The alluvial gold eventually petered out, but the underlying hard-rock potential remained. And there was plenty of work for everyone at Porgera.
Books can and have been written on the Mount Kare alluvial gold rush. Fascinating stuff it is too, as you would expect: spivs and conmen were quick on the scene; they love a gold rush as much as anybody else.
For today's purposes, all we need to know is that CRA eventually walked away from Mount Kare, with the forced abandonment of its Panguna copper mine as attacks by secessionist rebels over on Bougainville Island encouraged the exit from all things PNG for the company. (Rio's listed subsidiary Bougainville Copper still harbours ambitions of returning Panguna to production.)
Canadian groups secured title to Mount Kare and in the 1990s and the opening years of the new century, they set about assessing the hard-rock potential of the site.
The Canadians outlined, under their national reporting requirements, a 1.7 million ounce hard-rock gold resource (1.9 million ounces if you give the silver in the mineralisation a gold equivalent value).
But the 2008 global financial crisis clipped their wings and Mount Kare ended up for sale in the hands of a liquidator. Indochine has now secured an option over the deposit in a deal with the private Aussie-PNG syndicate that acquired Mount Kare from the liquidator, with an initial payment of $4 million made by Indochine last week.
Full details of the expected shares-and-cash deal that will give Indochine control of Mount Kare are expected to be released within 21 days or so. When that happens, stand by for a re-rating of the stock.
At Friday's closing price for the stock of 30¢ a share, Indochine was being valued at $82 million. Compare that to the fancy market values of any number of ASX-listed West African gold explorers with similar-sized projects to Mount Kare under their belt and you'll see why the re-rating potential is there.
PNG can be a hairy place, as can West Africa. But if Garimpeiro had to be dropped into either of them, PNG would (now) be his choice. He says now because of the $20 billion being pumped in to developing PNG's gas export business by Exxon Mobil and others. It is transformational stuff for PNG in terms of all the things that will make the country less difficult to get things done. Things such as telecommunications, air services, and technical and legal support, not to mention the new casino and hotels that are going up in Port Moresby.
Once the Indochine option over Mount Kare is bedded down, the plan is to start work on an ASX-compliant resource. The estimate by the Canadians was largely in the drill-indicated category, so the swap from their assessment to one that suits local reporting requirements should be plain sailing.
More to the point is that the Canadians' assessment was based on a gold price of $US300 an ounce and a silver price of $US5.50 an ounce. Both metals now trade at multiples of those prices, so you would have to think there is now potential to add a sizeable open-cut resource to the underground resource.
It is also worth noting that while ''nearology'' is a dangerous practice, Mount Kare does have similar geology and geological setting to the Porgera deposit. Whether or not Mount Kare too has a Zone 7 that will be uncovered by further exploration remains to seen.
What is known is that the current Canadian resource estimate (it has a high-grade portion of 740,000 ounces of gold in 4.6 million tonnes of material grading 5g/tonne gold) is good enough for Indochine to get working on a feasibility study of Mount Kare's development.
March 7, 2011
There's plenty of potential in picking up where the Mount Kare alluvial gold rush left off.
IT HAS been a case of back to the future for Stephen Promnitz, chief executive of the south-east Asia and south-west Pacific copper-gold explorer Indochine Mining (ASX: IDC). Indochine raised $20 million in its December float on the strength of a big copper-gold exploration tenement package in little-explored Cambodia as its main go.
The float attracted the backing of the mighty fund manager BlackRock and hedge fund Och-Ziff as substantial shareholders, with holdings of 7 per cent and 14 per cent respectively. Drilling gets under way at the Cambodia properties later this year, but in the meantime Promnitz has secured an option for Indochine over the Mount Kare gold project in Papua New Guinea.
As a young geologist with CRA (since merged with Rio Tinto), Promnitz witnessed at Mount Kare one of the great alluvial gold rushes of the modern era.
The 1988-89 rush left an impression.
''It was the most astounding thing I have ever seen,'' Promnitz told Garimpeiro.
''There was more gold than you could poke a stick at. So much so that I thought I would never be looking for gold again.
''The locals were shaking gold nuggets from the roots of the grass. Some of the nuggets were the size of goose eggs. It was on for young and old.
''We saw the place go from having nobody there to having more than 6000 people with picks and shovels in the space of six weeks.''
Gold was well understood in the region, given Barrick's 25-million-ounce Porgera deposit some 20 kilometres away. Porgera hadn't been developed by then but it had been a gold exploration project for 30 years. What eventually got Porgera into production was the discovery there of Zone 7, with its amazing grade of 40 grams of gold a tonne.
In the end, the locals who swarmed onto the alluvial patch at Mount Kare plucked more than 1 million ounces of gold from thick, sticky clay. The alluvial gold eventually petered out, but the underlying hard-rock potential remained. And there was plenty of work for everyone at Porgera.
Books can and have been written on the Mount Kare alluvial gold rush. Fascinating stuff it is too, as you would expect: spivs and conmen were quick on the scene; they love a gold rush as much as anybody else.
For today's purposes, all we need to know is that CRA eventually walked away from Mount Kare, with the forced abandonment of its Panguna copper mine as attacks by secessionist rebels over on Bougainville Island encouraged the exit from all things PNG for the company. (Rio's listed subsidiary Bougainville Copper still harbours ambitions of returning Panguna to production.)
Canadian groups secured title to Mount Kare and in the 1990s and the opening years of the new century, they set about assessing the hard-rock potential of the site.
The Canadians outlined, under their national reporting requirements, a 1.7 million ounce hard-rock gold resource (1.9 million ounces if you give the silver in the mineralisation a gold equivalent value).
But the 2008 global financial crisis clipped their wings and Mount Kare ended up for sale in the hands of a liquidator. Indochine has now secured an option over the deposit in a deal with the private Aussie-PNG syndicate that acquired Mount Kare from the liquidator, with an initial payment of $4 million made by Indochine last week.
Full details of the expected shares-and-cash deal that will give Indochine control of Mount Kare are expected to be released within 21 days or so. When that happens, stand by for a re-rating of the stock.
At Friday's closing price for the stock of 30¢ a share, Indochine was being valued at $82 million. Compare that to the fancy market values of any number of ASX-listed West African gold explorers with similar-sized projects to Mount Kare under their belt and you'll see why the re-rating potential is there.
PNG can be a hairy place, as can West Africa. But if Garimpeiro had to be dropped into either of them, PNG would (now) be his choice. He says now because of the $20 billion being pumped in to developing PNG's gas export business by Exxon Mobil and others. It is transformational stuff for PNG in terms of all the things that will make the country less difficult to get things done. Things such as telecommunications, air services, and technical and legal support, not to mention the new casino and hotels that are going up in Port Moresby.
Once the Indochine option over Mount Kare is bedded down, the plan is to start work on an ASX-compliant resource. The estimate by the Canadians was largely in the drill-indicated category, so the swap from their assessment to one that suits local reporting requirements should be plain sailing.
More to the point is that the Canadians' assessment was based on a gold price of $US300 an ounce and a silver price of $US5.50 an ounce. Both metals now trade at multiples of those prices, so you would have to think there is now potential to add a sizeable open-cut resource to the underground resource.
It is also worth noting that while ''nearology'' is a dangerous practice, Mount Kare does have similar geology and geological setting to the Porgera deposit. Whether or not Mount Kare too has a Zone 7 that will be uncovered by further exploration remains to seen.
What is known is that the current Canadian resource estimate (it has a high-grade portion of 740,000 ounces of gold in 4.6 million tonnes of material grading 5g/tonne gold) is good enough for Indochine to get working on a feasibility study of Mount Kare's development.
Huli wigmen for world music festival
HULI wigmen dancers will have a chance to showcase PNG culture at this weekend’s world music festival in Adelaide, Australia, The National reports.
The Huli dancers from Southern Highlands have been invited by organisers, a first of its kind, to add colour and a different music flavour with their kundu drums.
The biennial music festival attracts some of the world’s popular rock and contemporary bands.
The Huli Duna Cultural Group, consisting of men, women and children, will leave for Adelaide tomorrow for the March 11-14 festival.
Markham Galut, who is the coordinator for the trip, said: “We are there to showcase our huge cultural heritage.
“We want to see if we can feature, blend and promote PNG culture to the world music scene.”
Galut, a freelance artist, dancer and musician, has been working closely with David Brady, a Melbourne-based musician, who has been promoting PNG string-band music, especially Tolai rock legend George Telek.
Brady, through the organisers, had extended the invitation to PNG through Galut who had a difficult task in selecting a group to represent more than 800 different cultural groups.
“I sent the some sample videos of our traditional dancers and the organisers were impressed with the colourful Huli dancers,” Galut said.
The group’s return air tickets, accommodation and transport while in Australia will be met by the festival organisers.
Huli Duna Cultural Group chairman Simon Bole, who will be accompanying his dance troupe, said PNG had been talking about and promoting the LNG project.
Bole said the LNG project would only bring Western cultures and modernisation, “a threat to our culture”.
He said the LNG project would come and go but unique cultures and traditions must be preserved for long term sustainable tourism dollars.
“The LNG project will not promote our cultures. We have a rich culture that we must protect at all costs.
“We must preserve and teach our children to uphold our cultures which will become extinct if nothing is done,” Bole said.
He also appealed to Culture and Tourism Promotion Authority to support freelancers such as Galut, who had given their time and resource, to give the Huli an opportunity to become ambassadors representing PNG’s different tribes at this year’s world music festival.
 |
| The Huli Duna Cultural Group rehearsing in Port Moresby for the world music festival in Adelaide, Australia, starting this Friday. |
The biennial music festival attracts some of the world’s popular rock and contemporary bands.
The Huli Duna Cultural Group, consisting of men, women and children, will leave for Adelaide tomorrow for the March 11-14 festival.
Markham Galut, who is the coordinator for the trip, said: “We are there to showcase our huge cultural heritage.
“We want to see if we can feature, blend and promote PNG culture to the world music scene.”
Galut, a freelance artist, dancer and musician, has been working closely with David Brady, a Melbourne-based musician, who has been promoting PNG string-band music, especially Tolai rock legend George Telek.
Brady, through the organisers, had extended the invitation to PNG through Galut who had a difficult task in selecting a group to represent more than 800 different cultural groups.
“I sent the some sample videos of our traditional dancers and the organisers were impressed with the colourful Huli dancers,” Galut said.
The group’s return air tickets, accommodation and transport while in Australia will be met by the festival organisers.
Huli Duna Cultural Group chairman Simon Bole, who will be accompanying his dance troupe, said PNG had been talking about and promoting the LNG project.
Bole said the LNG project would only bring Western cultures and modernisation, “a threat to our culture”.
He said the LNG project would come and go but unique cultures and traditions must be preserved for long term sustainable tourism dollars.
“The LNG project will not promote our cultures. We have a rich culture that we must protect at all costs.
“We must preserve and teach our children to uphold our cultures which will become extinct if nothing is done,” Bole said.
He also appealed to Culture and Tourism Promotion Authority to support freelancers such as Galut, who had given their time and resource, to give the Huli an opportunity to become ambassadors representing PNG’s different tribes at this year’s world music festival.
Bank South Pacific K283.15m net profit
BANK South Pacific posted an after tax profit of K283.15 million for the financial year 2010, The National reports.
The bank also announced that its assets as of December last year were worth K8.655 billion, up 6% from December 2009.
BSP chairman Kostas Constantinou made the disclosure in a financial result submitted to the Port Moresby Stock Exchange.
The bank’s pre-tax profit was K402.10 million, up 6% from K377.96 million posted at the end of 2009.
Constantinou said that emerging from period of some uncertainty into a year that held out some promise of a strengthening global recovery, and some positive expectations about the domestic economy, the BSP Group achieved sound result last year.
He said this was characterised by continued profitability and balance of sheet growth, showing operational and financial stability.
Constantinou said most of the growth was attributed to non-interest income streams following a fall in net interest margins occasioned by a prolonged decline in bank bill rates since late in the second quarter of the year.
The newly-appointed chairman stressed the re-branding of BSP continued to be successful last year with some emphasis given to the appropriate BSP branding of newly-acquired business in
He said overall, the group posted well-rounded financial achievement for last year considering that the bank was progressing with major commitments to transform its programmes.
Constantinou said much work had been required on the integration of the newly acquired
“In 2010, there was evidence of a slow strengthening of global economic conditions with large traditional economic powers in North America and Europe showing more sustained recovery trends and the developing high-growth Asian and South American economies continuing to accelerate,” Constantinou said.
“PNG’s economy became increasingly exposed to those global trends as we move closer towards major steps change expected as the LNG project reaches production phase.
BSP was striving to get itself into a position where it would be able to achieve solid performances which would be competitive by global standards under these conditions.
“The 2010 results showed that we continue on track with this objective,” Constantinou added.
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