Pruaitch calls for sacking of KPHL board, management

Posted by The National

OPPOSITION Leader Patrick Pruaitch has called for the immediate sacking of the management and board of Kumul Petroleum Holdings Limited (KPHL) for acting against national interest and refusing to cooperate with Permanent Parliamentary Committee on Public Accounts (PAC) hearings.
“The board and management of Kumul Petroleum are behaving as though they are a law unto themselves and this should not be tolerated,” Pruaitch said.
He claimed there were at least six national interest grounds to support the sacking of the KPHL board and management, among them:

• KPHL has made false and erroneous public statements and never reported satisfactorily to Parliament on its operational and financial status;
• In spite of its role as a state-owned enterprise, KPHL had adversely impacted the lives of Papua New Guineans by hiding massive foreign exchange revenues in a Singapore bank account;
• KPHL board and chief executive officer Wapu Sonk misled National Government Ministers and the public regarding its lack of support for the National Budget;
• Although Prime Minister James Marape has decreed that KPHL will report to, and come under the jurisdiction of the Minister for State Enterprises Sasindran Muthuvel, the company has failed to cooperate with the minister;
• No government in any country would tolerate the stance taken by KPHL as a state-owned enterprise that it was not answerable to the nation’s Parliament, or for that matter, the Public Accounts Committee; and
• It was ethically wrong for KPHL to divert its LNG revenues to a Singapore bank account and to borrow funds from PNG banks in order to pay government dividends and for working capital.

This has a highly detrimental impact on the PNG economy.
Pruaitch said among the misleading statements attributable to KPHL was a recent July 3 statement by chairman Andrew Baing.
The Opposition leader alleged that chairman Baing that said since 2014 KPHL “has delivered to the State over K4 billion in dividends, returns of capital, taxes and other strategic, social and community in the country.
“This represent 78 per cent of KPHL’s available cashflow.
“As former Treasurer from March 2014 to May 2017, I can testify that this claim is palpable nonsense,” he said. “In 2016, KPHL paid the Government K200 million which it claimed was an advance to Government.
“As I disclosed previously, corporate taxes paid by KPHL are far below payments listed in company annual reports, a difference of K500 million just for 2014 and 2015 alone.”
Pruaitch said that, in his statement, Baing promised that KPHL would present a full and comprehensive report on its financial affairs to Parliament in the first week of July. This never happened.
On that day, Marape told Parliament Muthuvel would submit a full report to Parliament on KPHL.

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