Works Minister Francis Awesa is calling on the Australia High Commission to publish a list of companies and businesses contracted to work at the Manus Regional Resettlement Program.
Awesa said this to LOOP PNG after the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper published an article about a contract awarded to Hornibrooks NGI Ltd worth more than K15 million ($7.8million) to build houses associated with the program.
Awesa is a co-director and shareholder of Hornibrooks.
He says Hornibrooks was given the contract through the Australian government’s procurement process and the PNG government had no control over that.
“My name has been tarnished after the article by the Sydney Morning Herald for something I had no part in,” he added.
Awesa says although the resettlement program is in our country, the National Executive Council has no say over who they give contracts to.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted anti-corruption researcher and academic Kristian Lasslet saying that giving a major refugee centre related contract to a company part-owned and managed by the works minister of a government that Australia desperately needs to handle a controversy that has defined successive elections, would appear to be “the dictionary definition of conflict of interest’’.
Doctor Lasslet, who is a senior lecturer in criminology at Ulster University, said the connection could be explosive in a country like PNG.
"You have a foreign government asking Papua New Guinea to catch a very hot political potato, namely the offshore processing centres for refugees, which is deeply unpopular domestically in PNG. And now it appears a senior member of cabinet, the Works Minister no less, will be a personal beneficiary of the lucrative contracts being handed out by the Australian government as a result of these offshore processing centres," Dr Lasslet said to the newspaper.
The housing project involves building married officers' quarters on Lombrum Naval Base in the area known as Upper Paradise and is due to be completed by March 2016.
LOOP PNG has requested for comments from the Australian government.