Payments to landowners a sham

RECENTLY, certain landowner companies received a K180 million windfall in MoA funds.
According to reliable sources within the departments of Petroleum & Energy (DPE) and Finance, these payments were made outside the ambit of established bureaucratic systems and procedures.
I am more than convinced that the expenditure implementation committee (EIC) and DPE were circumvented in processing and approving the project submissions from these landowner companies.
It is now public knowledge that only a few ministers brought the integrity of relevant State institutions into disrepute and approved these payments under dubious circumstances.
Only time will tell who these ministers are and why they approved these payments. 
I do not wish to delve into the procedural issues or lack of them over these payments to these sham landowner companies nor do I wish to join the bandwagon of Opposition politicians and aggrieved landowners raising concerns over these payments in the media.
I merely wish to share my convictions over the manner in which project submissions from some landowner companies were approved for funding using MoA funds. 
There should not be any doubt that all these landowner companies are from Hela, which in itself is welcoming news for the landowners and people of Hela in terms of infrastructure developments and other sustainable projects.
However, the danger is that most of these landowner companies are a sham and owned by one or two individuals with no executives or shareholders from the various oil and gas projects.
Nor do these landowner companies and their executives represent legitimate interests of genuine landowners and the Hela people.
Worst still these landowner companies neither have the management capacities nor the experience or expertise, nor the machinery to implement multi-million kina projects from MoA funds.
Given the track records of these individuals in the past, what guarantees are there that they would implement these project submissions using these MoA funds?
What guarantee can the State and its instrumentalities give to genuine landowners and the Hela nation that these purported landowner companies would implement the projects?
I am compelled to concede that these landowner companies may have been legally promulgated and incorporated under the auspicious of representing certain groups of landowners from each project area.
In actual fact, these companies are an absolute sham, which have been cleverly schemed with the intention to defraud the State, deprive genuine landowners and the people of tangible developmental projects.
It is ironic to note that the same groups of individuals are now fighting over the formation and composition of an umbrella company for landowners in Hides, Juha, Angore and Moran.  

Pro-change 
Hela