Bank’s issues will be sorted, Marape says

PRIME Minister James Marape says there are management and board issues at the National Development Bank (NDB) which will be looked into.
“There are some issues at the moment, management and board issues and I do apologise for this,” Marape said this on Friday.
“We will be fixing it as we have given two years for many people who work in our key agencies of state.
“I have put on notice all in the State-owned entities and all in the state business spaces including NDB, if you felt you haven’t delivered, you resign before we remove you because you have two years.”
Former commerce and industry minister William Duma previously highlighted that an independent audit into the bank had exposed flaws in its internal control, systematic legacy issues and conflicts of interest.
Duma had revealed that senior executives of the bank were involved.
He said the audit which was done by PricewaterhouseCoopers highlighted: “Systematic internal control failures with risk, compliance and delegated lending authorities in the bank’s credit department and deficient governance which contributed to conflict of interests.
“As a result of weak internal controls and systematic failures, the level of loan provisioning and loan losses were highlighted as abnormal and well above industry standard.”