BCL landowners slam ‘state ownership’ stance

By MALUM NALU
PANGUNA Landowners’ Association – comprising traditional landowners of the Bougainville copper mine – have hit back at the PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum for supporting state ownership of resources in the country.
Association secretary Lawrence Daveona said in Tuesday’s article in The National detailed “very shallow reasons to justify its support for state ownership as opposed to landowners having full or controlling ownership of resources in their respective regions of PNG”.
“This is a very  narrow view that the Chamber of Mines and Petroleum has been sounding out to illiterate Papua New Guineans,  government bureaucrats and more so us the landowners,” he said.
“PNG Chamber of Mines and Petroleum has to state all these as it is funded or supported in many ways by most of the foreign investors operating in this country.
“We the people of Panguna mine have suffered under the Bougainville Copper Agreement (BCA) and we have, over the past 23-odd years, researched the whole arrangement that has cost us many lives.
“In our view, many of the agreements from Panguna mine to date are flawed,” Daveona said.
He said the association, in its review of Bougainville copper agreements and others in PNG, had noted that:
g    Mining operators had consistently underreported measured and indicated resources at the time of negotiating agreements with the national government, provincial governments, landowners and local level governments,  resulting in reductions or waivers of economic interest and royalties;
g    Mining operators had, in each instance, separated benefits derived from asset sales, economic benefits from financial instruments, and the trading value of public equities on international stock exchanges from the legal corporate shell company set up to enter into agreements (including royalty and equity agreements) with provincial and landowner interests;
g    Provincial governments and landowners had been universally excluded from any benefit on the speculative appreciation of equity value derived from public market announcements of measured and indicated reserves on their lands by having no exposure to benefit from public market stock trading; and
g    Economic benefit agreements had been focused on percentage of employment and percentage of contracting in number (a percentage of employees rather than a percentage of gross compensation), rather than in gross economic value (total percentage of all corporate payroll; procurement.;
gNo use of trade credit offsets had been leveraged for the companies supplying mining supplies or heavy equipment meaning that over 30% of international par equivalents were being lost for the economic benefit of the provinces or the national economy;
gVisibility on the corporate activities surrounding the mines and land use promoted to international investors had, in no instance, matched the statements made to PNG interests and no mechanism for such discrepancy resolution has been put in place; and,
gNo adequate controls had been in place to insure that royalties, taxes, environmental law compliance, human rights, and international standards on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (particularly in the undersea mining technologies) were held to a standard commensurate with the rest of the world.
Daveona said revisions to the Mining Act of 1992 must take into account each of the deficiencies listed below and should not be forwarded for consideration until they are all explicitly addressed.