Polye slams share takeover

 OPPOSITION leader Don Polye has lashed out at a decision by the new owner of New Britain Palm Oil Limited (NBPOL) to take over local shareholding.

Malaysian multinational Sime Darby, which owns 98.8 per cent of NBPOL, announced last month that it was “compulsory” for it to acquire the remaining shares from under the takeover code.

Polye said the local West New Britain shareholders must be allowed to make a decision based on commercial advice before they withdraw and sell their shares.

“A company cannot institute a compulsory acquisition of shares which is not in the concern of the landowners or of those that hold shares in the first place, especially when they are indigenous and they are Papua New Guineans,” Polye told a media conference yesterday.

“Having shares in business like these is good for the people and it’s good for the country’s economy.

“Papua New Guineans as hosts cannot just watch an investor leaving them out of this financial business network. 

“If we allow businesses to seize the opportunities that people already have, then it is very detrimental and a disadvantage to Papua New Guineans.”

Poyle said the move undermined the people’s ability to own and grow their businesses through opportunities available in the country.

“You find a foreign company now extracting all those opportunities available to our people to save money through equity participation and owning business, owning a business of growing capital, growing asset 

in that business and in the expansion of the business but the people are automatically left out,” Polye said.

“Therefore people don’t have any ownership of money, they don’t have money from the business opportunity created and they are cutoff the chain of money network. 

“And what Sime Darby is doing to cut our people off the opportunity that is ever growing, to tell Papua New Guineans that it has to buy back shares under some right that they have.”