Prime Minister Peter O’Neill today came under fire from the Opposition over a number of decisions relating to government loans and debts and the economy.
Opposition Leader Don Polye questioned why Mr O’Neill intends to mortgage the 4.27% equity interest of the LNG landowners and affected provinces for another loan of K2.5 billion through the issue of the sovereign bond.
Hela Governor Anderson Agiru, who over the recent week questioned the PM over the delay in the LNG payment to the landowners, walked out of Parliament as O’Neill got up to answer the questions.
Mr Polye wanted to know why there was an increase in the bond from K700 million kina as per the budget to K2.5 billion.
This, Mr O’Neill failed to answer too. Instead he said that Polye failed to understand how the economy worked.
Polye says if the PM continues to” tell lies’’ undermining the intellectuality of MPs in Parliament, he would provide hard copies of documents to ensure Prime Minister Peter O’Neill “gets ashamed again for telling lies”.
Notably, for the first time, government ministers and back benchers who would normally back O’Neill by way of interjections and points of order, remained silent, leaving O’Neill alone to fight his own battle.
Sinesine Yongomugl MP Kerenga Kua also took O’Neill to task over the short supply of foreign currency in PNG.
Mr Kua said foreign currency which was supposed to come into PNG’s economy, was not materializing as it had been diverted to an ESCRO account in Singapore to pay off the controversial UBS loan obtained by the government.
Sir Michael Somare also asked the Prime Minister to clarify whether the LNG proceeds were kept in a trust account in BPNG which earlier clarified that there was no such account within the bank.
O’Neill, when answering this question, did not clearly state whether it was royalty or not but denied the bank’s clarification.