The Mount Kare gold rush in 1988 brought scores of people scrambling into the area to get a slice of the billion dollar action. One of them was Tari businessman for 20 years, Andi Flower, who brokered the best deal for any mining operation in PNG - a 49% equity for Hetapuli and Paela landowners with CRA - only to be undermined and destroyed by greed, political corruption and foreign “carpet beggars”. Andi tells his story in his book released a few weeks ago. YEHIURA HRIEHWAZI who reported part of the Mt Kare action reviews the book.

IT was a quiet Sunday afternoon inside the newsroom on June 1, 1992. Andi Flower walked with a small leather brief-case. He looked totally haggard. I had known him for several months, soft-spoken, but lively and always talking niceties about his beloved Hetapula people of Southern Highlands and the Paelans of Enga. He’s been a trader for 20 years in Tari, Kombiam, Porgera and Laiagam.
But this afternoon, he was troubled, fatigue was chewing into him. The no-smoking rule in the office prevented him from lighting up. He settled in a chair and in an interview punctuated with heavy breathing and eyes darting toward the door he’d just came in from, (incase he was followed by a particular ‘tamed’ policeman and lawyers) he talked about his arrest at the Travelodge Hotel (now Crowne Plaza) on Friday night and how he was locked inside the Boroko police slammer.
To get to the newsroom he had to weave and duck from police.
This weekend meeting with Andi Flower is mentioned in a book he co-authored with Dave Henton and released a few weeks ago: Mount Kare Gold Rush. A leading Port Moresby law firm and a former Australian journalist, Denis Reinhardt, who had since been deported from PNG, were after him. They wanted him re-arrested.
Andi’s crime: he had brokered the best possible deal for the Hetapula and the Paelans to own 49% of Mount Kare Alluvial Mining Limited (MKAM) through their landowner company, Kare-Puga Development Corporation (KDC). Conzic Rio Tinto of Australia (CRA) owned 51% and was the managing partner of the alluvial mining lease on Mount Kare. It was the best thing that even happened in any mining operation in PNG. CRA also owned the hard-rock prospect around the alluvial operation.
In his book, Andi discusses his Mount Kare experience in harrowing details of how junior Australian minors: Ramsgate Resources, Oakland Ltd, and Menzies Gold undermined PNG’s best ever mining deal for landowners.
They worked in association with a leading law firm in Port Moresby and with Denis Reinhardt who had established himself inside offices of Port Moresby politicians and with corrupt and unscrupulous leaders “in the name of landowners”, but all they really wanted was a slice of the billion dollar gold-rich Kare.
A Peter Walker of the scandalous Blood Bank in Sydney and failed miners of a disastrous Horn Island gold mine on Thursday Island (Torres Strait) were involved in undoing the MKAM deal.
Having lost out in PNG, Denis Reinhardt, according to the book, resurfaces in Solomon Islands in an attempt to take over the Gold Ridge Mine outside Honiara with Melbourne law firm - Slater and Gordon. These were lawyers that backed the Lower Ok Tedi River landowners and walked out of PNG with about K30 million from BHP and left the landowners high and dry.
Reinhardt and the lawyers failed in Solomon Islands and got their fingers burnt.
It’s a classic case of how foreigners could walk in and manipulate local Melanesians by throwing around money and booked them into hotels with endless flows of alcoholic beverages and then get them to sign papers. The foreigners are only driven by greed and vested interests. A far cry for what Andi - who spent over 20 years living among the Huli people - did for the KDC.
“I brokered the best deal for the landowners with CRA, and there were no kickbacks, no sweetheart deals and no under-counter arrangements. As to my relationship with CRA, it would be more correct to say that we used one another. I used CRA to get what I could for the landowners, and CRA used me to get the landowners on board. After Bougainville, they knew then needed them. We were often uneasy bedfellows. I don’t think CRA were all taken by me, and I didn’t much like them, but I’ll say one thing for them - they had the right intent, and they had morality and ethics,” says Andi in the book.
The book gives details of Andi’s fight, especially with several Engan leaders - many of whom have been in and out of jail for fraud, graft and corruption. Some were failed politicians, others were sitting MPs who would stop at nothing until they saw Andi “put away” or “blown away.”
The so-called leaders colluded with Australian “carpet beggars” (as described by former Prime Minister Sir Rabbie Namaliu) and fuelled the anti-KDC set up. Eventually, on the night of January 9th 1993 a group of hired mercenaries armed with factory-made and home-made guns raided the mining camp on Mt Kare.
In the book, its evident that the use and abuse of power and downright political corruption are evident from start to finish. Greed stops at nothing and showed its ugly face through the destruction and burning down of the mining camp.
An armed balaclava-wearing gang attacked the mine firing guns in the air. They terrorized employees and caused damages worth K3 million, stole K7,000 in cash and K25,000 worth of gold and left a note telling CRA to get out of Mt Kare.
Before the gang left, they forced mine manager John Bartram and several employees at gun-point to pour diesel and kerosene on buildings and a helicopter and set them alight.
Andi came close to being hacked to death while helping to set up KDC in opposition to what the Australians were trying to set up for themselves.
During one meeting with the Hetapulas and Paelans at Mt Kare, a dissident landowner from Paela swung an axe at Andi. It missed his hand by millimeters and the axed blade sunk deep into the wooden table. Andi looked at the axe, ignored it and kept on writing - an act from someone who lived among them for so long and knew how to react in such situations.
In Tari, two Australians spread word that Andi had ordered the killing of some clansmen at Mount Kare. When Andi arrived, in Tari he sensed trouble and ordered in a helicopter to rescue him before he was mob-lynched.
At the Islander Hotel’s coffee house in Port Moresby, he was having dinner when Tom Amaiu walked in and swung at him sending his food and plates flying all over the floor. He straightened up and swung back at Amaiu before the security guards escorted Amaiu out of the hotel (now Holiday Inn) and Andi sat down and continued with his dinner.
He was in and out of court more times than any litigation lawyer in Port Moresby - on most occasions he observed that Denis Reinhardt accompanied the lawyers who filed complaints against him.

The following are some excerpts of the book as told by Andi:

For the next meeting we decided to try a venue remote from Moresby and Kare, somewhere more conducive to considered and fruitful discussion. We decided on the Plantation Hotel, outside Madang, and chartered a bus from Mendi to drive most of the participants down. They consumed large quantities of booze on the way, and arrived two days later. I was already in Madang, but I couldn’t get out to the hotel until several hours after they arrived. We had arranged with the hotel that the bar would remain closed at all times, but when I eventually arrived there I walked into a riot. The Highland Task Force members had threatened the coastal barman with death, and booze was flowing freely. Phil Moore, CRA’s Mount Kare liaison officer, had disappeared. Luckily I had my trusty green baseball bat. When I walked in Wapula was sitting on the bar demanding more drink. I walked up to him and said that the bar was now closed. He did not like it one little bit and challenged me, but I stood my ground and he backed down. It was then that I noticed that most of the Task Force members, mainly from the Paiela side, had gone to the beach. I followed them down. They hadn’t gone to stare at the ocean, although many of them had never seen it before.
You need to remember that the Task Force members were rich. They all had gold, many had several kilos of it, and some were carrying it in rice bags. Word had got out, and the good-time girls were attracted like iron filings to a magnet. The scene on the beach was like nothing I have ever known. They were rutting like stoats. Even a sanitized description would offend decent ears. Suffice to say that rabbits are more modest, and better at foreplay, prolonging the carnal act, and saying ‘Thank you’ afterwards. The next day we moved the girls out, many of whom may now have been millionaires. There were sore heads all around, thanks to the combined effect of booze and the bat. Some were still drunk, and it did not augur well for a productive meeting. Paul Torato was there, hijacking the attempted meeting with his hysterical ranting. Although he was told to piss off, there was no way the meeting could even start. The bat probably prevented an all-out riot.
A lot of the action was in Port Moresby, and it became clear that many of the landowner Directors did not really understand what commercial mining involved. This was entirely understandable - they had no experience of it at all. We decided to take them on a ‘study tour’ to Queensland. At the same time we could revise the shareholders’ agreements, and look at how KDC would be funded. We applied for passports for about 26 of them, and then for Australian visas. On 27 March 1990 we were on a chartered plane to Cairns, about one and a half hours flying from Port Moresby. They were all very excited.
About ten minutes out of Cairns Akoma Peke approached me. ‘Mi holim liklik pistol, em i orait o nogat?’ - ‘I’ve got a small pistol, is that OK or not?’. He showed it to me, packed on top of his cabin baggage. I told him to put it away, and started thinking fast. If Customs found a pistol on one of them, they would go through the others with a fine toothed comb. God knows what they would find. There might even be cavity searches. I nearly gave birth.
As it turned out, our arrival in Cairns generated more than enough diversions. Many of the Directors were clutching whole bunches of betel nut - a hard palm fruit that is chewed with lime powder and a stick of native ‘mustard’ to produce a mildly narcotic effect. It also produces large volumes of bright red saliva, which people spit freely. The quarantine officers told us that there was no way unhusked betel nut was entering Australia, and the Directors responded by husking the nuts on the spot. Several of them tried to chew as much as they could before they went past the quarantine desk, and the floor was soon awash with blood coloured spit. The quarantine officers tried to limit the damage by hustling them through as quickly as possible.
I seized the opportunity to collect all their passports, and hand them to an immigration officer. He looked at me, looked at the milling crowd of Highlanders, and then passed half the pile to his mate. They tried calling out names from the passports, but they were unfamiliar with Papua New Guinea spellings and pronunciation. Then they tried matching passport photos to faces. I suspect that all black people looked the same to them, because there were mistakes made with the first few to pass through. Eventually everyone was on the other side of the barrier, collecting their baggage, while the immigration people still had six unclaimed passports. They rolled their eyes, muttered quietly to themselves, stamped the remaining passports and gave them back to me. Customs had been watching this circus, and knew trouble when they saw it. They pushed everyone out through the green channel and on to the street. Phew.
I had a bus chartered to take us to the Tropical Gardens Motel, a few kilometres out of town. It was much better than the Daru Hotel - en suite bathrooms, air conditioners and television. The Directors may have been unsophisticated in some ways, but they were masters of the remote control. Within minutes they had found the in-house soft porn channel. This harmless diversion would later be blown up into an orgy of Madang proportions, with prostitutes supplied by me and CRA. I left them to it, went into town, and came back late in the afternoon. The place was deserted except for two of the elderly Paielans, who told me the others had gone to buy guns. I drove into town with great speed, and found them in a gun shop. Yaka Pipi was trying to buy a submachine gun, and was piling ounce after ounce of gold on the counter. The salesman was agog at the sight of so much gold, and I could see he might soon close the sale. Instead, I suggested instead that he close the shop as soon as I had hustled them out. As we were leaving, Yaka was telling him in Pidgin, ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ll see you later.’
On Wednesday we had a tour lined up for them. We flew north to an alluvial mine which was in full production. They saw the whole process, and started to understand what mining might be like at Mount Kare. Then we flew to a smaller mine and toured it. Finally we returned to Cairns by bus. We had a few beers on the way, and there was a fine esprit de corps.
On Thursday we started work, in a conference room at the motel. Phil Moore from CRA took the chair, but the Directors said they did not trust him, and replaced him with Matthew Habe. Phil was quite put out, and we didn’t see much of him after that. We reviewed the Daru meeting, and there were the usual rantings, ravings, repeats and changed minds. It took a long time to settle them down. Then we talked about funding KDC by borrowing money. By this time KDC’s 49 per cent had been confirmed and we needed K2.5 million, plus expenses. On Friday we revisited the shareholder agreement, and it was signed immediately and unconditionally by all MKAM Directors. Later Simon Kambe and Yaka Pipi would claim in court that they were forced to sign. Then a Westpac Brisbane representative talked about loan conditions. At that time it all looked very straightforward. Things had gone so well that I went into town for dinner with Matthew and Habia. When we returned at about 10 the Engans were nowhere to be seen. The troops were out on night manoeuvres.
I tracked them down in the bar at Hides Hotel - I had heard them talking about it. Akoma Peke was busy chatting up the barmaid. I doubt that she would normally have given him a second look, but he was paying for his beers with gold, and throwing in a generous tip each time. He had her full attention. I sat quietly in the corner and watched. Andrias joined him, bought half a dozen beers, and took them over to a table of Aboriginal girls whose men were playing snooker. Others joined him, and it was a lively table. When the snooker players came back they took one look at the KDC contingent and left the girls to their fate. The Paiela men were throwing their money around like drunk miners on a spree, which is just what they were. Come midnight the bar closed. The management thoughtfully called in the cops, and arranged a bus to take the boys home. The police behaved like true gentlemen, chivvied them out and saw them to the motel. The merry men had had a night to remember. For me it had been stressful, but amusing.

* The book is available on the internet: website: www.mountkaregoldrush.com


 

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