Punish them, says Polye

Reports by BOURA GORUKILA
FORMER Treasurer and Kandep MP Don Polye believes the decision he had made to refuse signing the cabinet submission for the Union Bank of Switzerland loan in 2014 was the right choice.
He told the Commission of Inquiry into the loan yesterday that those who did what they did in relation to the loan should be punished so a precedence was set for the children of PNG to follow.
He wanted the inquiry to make a recommendation to immediately prosecute those who were involved in abusing the trust placed on them by getting the K3 billion loan which had a great effect on the lives of the people.
“This kind of people should be punished so that our future generation are protected from doing similar things,” Polye said.
“Our future generation should be doing the right thing and we should show them by example.
“We should also show them that we are punishing these people who broke the law (and) processes and this will then guide them to not do the same thing again.
“Future leaders are watching, we should not make illegal activities normal.
“We should not make the breaking of law normal.
“We should not allow people to go free after breaking of the law or after committing a crime such as the UBS loan that has destroyed the economy of this country because when they are free, the young generation will take it as normal and what you will see is a society that is sick, poor, a lot of violence, a lot of frustration, hatred, anger, and disappointment everywhere.
“In this country, we have a culture of people letting people go free and the victims are those that suffer by the action of these big people, the executive level people, people in control, prime ministers, ministers and MPs.
“You will always find them come out, some even come out of the jails.
“This is unbelievable.”
“This is a developing country and the level of poverty is high, and those that have been entrusted with the responsibility like the prime minister or even others in public service abuse the responsibility and use that position for some gain like in the UBS case.
“Now they are struggling to create all kinds of psychological perception to make themselves look clean and good.”
“The people who suffer are the village people – about 99 per cent of the population – because of the doings of those in power.”
When asked if evidence given by Treasury secretary Dairi Vele that Cabinet submission was prepared for him as treasurer, but since he refused to sign, the signature of the then prime minister was inserted, Polye said that was a lie.
“The submission was not prepared for me,” he said.
“There was no paper prepared for me to sign; I, as the responsible minister, did not know about this paper until the Cabinet meeting of March 6, 2014.”