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Opposition Leader Patrick Pruaitch has called for immediate sacking of the Management and Board of Kumul Petroleum for acting against the national interest and refusing to cooperate with planned Parliamentary Accounts Committee hearings.
The Board and Management of Kumul Petroleum are behaving as though they are a law unto themselves and this should not be tolerated, Mr Pruaitch said.
Mr Pruaitch, in a statement said there are at least six national interest grounds to support the sacking of the Kumul Petroleum Board and Management. Among them and they include;
Kumul Petroleum making false and inaccurate public statements and never reported satisfactorily to Parliament on its operational and financial status;
In spite of its role as a State-Owned Enterprise, Kumul Petroleum has adversely impacted on the lives of all Papua New Guineans by hiding massive foreign exchange revenues in a Singapore-based
Kumul Petroleum’s Board and Chief Executive, Mr WapuSonk, have misled National Government Ministers and the public regarding its lack of support for the National Government budget;
Although Prime Minister James Marape has decreed that Kumul Petroleum will report to, and come under, jurisdiction of the Minister for State Enterprises, Mr Sasindran Muthuvel, the company has failed to cooperate with the Minister;
Another reason is that no government in any country would tolerate the stance taken by Kumul Petroleum as a State-Owned Enterprise that it is not answerable to the nation’s parliament, or for that matter, the Parliamentary Accounts Committee and that it was ethically wrong for Kumul Petroleum 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.
Mr Pruaitch said among the false claims attributable to Kumul Petroleum are a recent July 3 statement by its chairman, Mr Andrew Baing.
He stated that since 2014 Kumul Petroleum “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% of Kumul Petroleum’s available cashflow.
As former PNG Treasurer from March 2014 to May 2017, Mr. Pruaitch said he can testify that this claim is nonsense. In 2016 Kumul Petroleum paid the government K200 million which it claimed was an ‘Advance to Government’.
As disclosed previously, he added, corporate taxes paid by Kumul Petroleum are far below payments listed in company annual reports, a difference of K500 million for 2014 and 2015 alone.
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