Oil Search reinforces PR team as pressure mounts on several fronts

By Matthew Stevens | Australian Financial Review 

Don’t imagine for a second that Oil Search sits wholly calm amid the storm created by the dumping of long-standing Papua New Guinea prime minister Peter O'Neill  and the company’s place in the events that proved a tipping point in the collapse of political support for him.

In the lead-up to O’Neill’s replacement by leadership neophyte James Marape, Oil Search made wholesale changes to the way it manages its external affairs, delivering new blood to its media management and inviting Crosby Textor to take on the driller’s reputation management.

The most immediate effect of the Oil Search deckchair shuffle is that long-standing general manager of investor relations and communications, Ann Diamant, appears to have lost half of her brief to a former PNG television executive.

A familiar media contact point through her 16 years with Oil Search, Diamant has surrendered the day-to-day of communications and media management to a new face in the Australian media landscape. The new vice-president, communications and media, is Matthew Park.

Park lands at Oil Search with an ANU law degree, six years' experience in policy advisory with the Australian Communications and Media Authority and a whole lot of experience in PNG television. His most recent job of import was running a TV station in PNG and, even more recently, he ran PR for PNG’s APEC advisory council. But, according to his various CVs, that is about as close as he has got to knowing who’s who in the zoo of Australian media, or media anywhere but PNG for that matter.

Oil Search insiders suggest this shift and the decision to appoint Crosby Textor shows just how unnerved the company is by regime change rolling out in PNG.

As The Australian Financial Review reported on Friday, Marape continues to send mixed signals about his future relationship with Oil Search and its much more powerful partners in PNG liquid natural gas, Exxon and Total.

The house view at Oil Search is that Marape might seek changes to a recent deal with Santos that aligns the ownership of the P’nyang gasfield with a proposed LNG development, but that previous investment agreements will be left untouched.

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