Pruaitch maintains position at UBS loan inquiry

AITAPE-Lumi MP Patrick Pruaitch on Tuesday maintained his position at the Commission of Inquiry into the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) loan that section 209 (1) of the Constitution was not complied with in the UBS transaction.
Despite being shown some documents such as ministerial statements and parliamentary draft by Tiffany Twivey Nonggor stating that section 209 (1) was complied with, he still maintained his position. “I don’t recall tabling any documents regarding the UBS transaction on the floor of parliament, I remember giving a ministerial statement,” he said.
“A ministerial statement does not equate to approval of parliament, it is the budget bills that form the appropriations Act that allow the state to enter into any borrowing.
“A ministerial statement describes what has taken place and I remember clearly prime minister O’Neill requested me to make this statement. I’m required to do that because my boss asked me to.”
When asked how loans had been dealt in the past since he was treasurer a couple of times, he said the loans that “I dealt with were mainly concessional loans”.
“We dealt with multilateral partners like Asian Development Bank, World Bank and the repayment terms were quite valuable to the country,” he said.
“Loans like of the IPIC transaction that we entered into to assist the state in acquiring a stake in the PNG LNG project and the UBS loan itself were quite substantial because the repayment terms were based on commercial terms, and, thereby, unable to be funded by consolidated revenue, so the state went outside of the normal budgetary process and, therefore, we needed to go to parliament to invoke section 209(1) of the Constitution.
“But, before that happened, we needed an enabling Act to enable the state to participate in that particular (IPIC) transaction.”
Pruaitch said that was not so with the UBS loan.
“UBS loan, although I see budgetary speech and the interest, this is a massive loan obtained and one would have thought that this should be triggered outside the normal budget process,” he said.
“That’s why I still maintain that parliament has not given specific approval for the UBS loan.”