OMBUDSMAN ASKED TO FREEZE OVERSEAS ACCOUNTS AND ASSETS

POST COURIER REPORTS

All parliamentarians who have been referred by the Ombudsman Commission for failure to submit their annual returns must have all their overseas bank accounts frozen including their immediate relatives pending the outcome of the tribunals.
Bulolo MP Sam Basil said hundreds and millions of kina had been siphoned off by parliamentarians and their cohorts and was believed to have been stashed in overseas bank accounts and properties that needed to be liquidated and returned to the Independent State of Papua New Guinea, if they could not provide proof of how they had acquired the wealth.
Stacks of Public Accounts Committee (PAC) reports on misappropriation by politicians and their friends involving billions of kina were sitting in Waigani collecting dust while billions of kina was disappearing from numerous trust accounts where enforcement agencies were not interested to investigate, he claimed.
“Many leaders and top public servants are implicated whereby they have the power to frustrate the agencies which report to them therefore they themselves cannot be investigated and be prosecuted very easily.
“The Auditor-General’s office lack of funding and interest by the Somare Government over the eight years has partially crippled the office of A-G to effectively audit all public accounts therefore many unaccounted accounts are still pending while corruption is growing at an unprecedented scale. By the time their books are audited the concerned account managers and custodians, mainly the public servants and the politicians, would have been retired or living comfortable overseas.
“The only reason that I can think of why high profile members of parliament cannot simply compile their multiple annual returns is that they cannot justify their actual assets and cash against their parliamentarian wages or even against their small businesses that has an annual turnover less compared to the millions and billions that they stole,’’ the MP said.
“I call on the Ombudsman Commission to do justice to the 6.5 million people of PNG to freeze all overseas accounts of parliamentarians who have failed to submit their annual returns because it is more likely that the cash and properties worth billions of kina that they have acquired belong to the Independent State of Papua New Guinea and its people,’’ he said.
Mr Basil claimed that errant leaders were influencing “the system’’ while having more time to dilute their loot into “invisible and undetectable trusts’’.