Australian company swindled Lands funds: Minister

Caption:  Lands Minister Benny Allen.

By MATTHEW VARI

Sunday, June 5, 2016 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)

MINISTER for Lands and Physical Planning Benny Allan revealed to Parliament on Tuesday that more than K50 million has been paid to an Australian Company for its services for a contract initially worth AUS$2.8 million.

He said the company, TechnologyOne which was engage to implement a land document management system.

“The system was put in place some time ago to administer the process in which lands titles are being processed,” Minister Allen said.

“What happened was at that time the contract was being given to a company from Australia called the Technology number one (TechnologyOne).”

“The company was engaged to replace the system so it will replace the issues of titles, duplication of titles, and fake titles and so forth.”

He said, however, the company under the contract was supposed to have completed the task and received the amount put in the contract valued at AUS$2.8 million which did not happen.

“What transpired overtime was that the company was giving invoices to the department and up to the time that we discovered the problem back in 2013 and 2014 the company had received about K40 to K50 million.”

“We had put a stop to further payments and we brought that before CAC (Commission Against Corruption) which has now commissioned an investigation into the payment and also the contract awarded to that particular company.”

“At the moment we are waiting for an audit to be carried out to establish what had happened and the actual amount paid to this company,” he added.

The minister added that the system in its self is the best system designed to address the duplication of titles and any issues in relation to titles.

“Every information from the lodging of the application down to the last person who will press the button to get the title out was in my transparently put in place.”

“What the department will do is to allow the investigation to complete and deal with the contractor and get another person to put the same system in place.”