Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

with them. He’s a missionary, and like they say, you can’t leave missionaries alone, he makesmoney, and the politicians can come under a missionary then. He’s a very nice person, yes….hehas a lot of relations with the local people. …the timber thing is …what the government istrying to do is to stand in for the people represent the people to financiers, and what we want todo is let the resource owners deal directly with the financiers, and let the government stand backfor monitoring and that sort of thing, not to control this too much. I was directly involved withgetting rid of the WongWong people, because when I was in govt we got rid of them becausewhat they were doing was they were paying for the whole log, the whole log, about 60 to 100kina, and when they go back they make about 3-6000 kina per log. So I told them to piss off.And its up to the resource owners to find out and know what is really happening….the WongWong people have a lot of debts here, credit here, for the logs and everything here. (they’re nowtelling the people to wait for them to sell the logs before they can be paid)…that’s what theytried to do last year with the limestone mining up in the Boikin area. There is a very rich depositof limestone in Hawain all the way to Boikin, and these people tried to come in and they saidno, no, we’ll go in with all our equipment and all our equipment, well bring graders, dozers,everything, well go in and well pay you later, and they never did.…I was directly involved withthis I have connections with the landowners there, and we told them to get out, this is not theway to do business…well I heard rumors that [the one who did get paid] is not a landowner nota resource owner from that area. …Hugo is involved with a lot of things like bringing people inwithout work permits. In fact, they’re dealing with this right now, as of today, they’re drawingup a letter for him to pay up a fine because two of his expatriate workers are working withoutwork permits for 5 months now, overstaying by about 5 months... really he should be deported,but you because he is working with these people, these people should know better…they shouldfeel ashamed…you say you’re clean and you mix around with crooks like that—you are notclean. Like these two, with Sepik sea projects and the Windjammer, they are the people’s pridethere for the people of the East Sepik, and now they’re being used for the fun of some people, totake money out of…the loinery was supposed to be a Kolan, near the mouth of the Hawainriver, out there. …they moved it, and it shouldn’t be there. The wisdom of the project was tobring infrastructure to those people out there, roads, and spin off businesses and preferentialhiring, this was the deal. but then because these people threatened to withdraw, the province justoffered them this other site. Yes, the company was saying its going to be expensive to get itdone, and they wanted savings, and this is why they moved it. They did not offer anything inspinoff business at all for this, nothing. Its politics you know. Arthur should have been with thepeople and the kickoffs, but in this case it’s the company that is benefiting more than thepeople. They really missed out, the company really benefited a lot on this exercise. I mean, theyhad given the contract for the building of the factory to..uh, Heydridge..and they weresubcontracting to SBA, I mean someone went over and took a photograph and sent it to theombudsman commission was sent a photograph of the sign at the factory that said it all—contractor, subcontractor, everything , so the ombudsman went over and did their owninvestigation. So what they did was they took the sign down, and they put a up a sign that saidRichard Cowley (?) engineering—he’s the chicken feed man, the one who has the contract withcatering. The chicken man, So they came in and used his name as a front and gave him thischicken business in return. ..they used his name…he’s not experienced, just because they usedhis name to cover up their contract…they did the same thing with the Mobil station, the oldMobil station—closed now. What happened was the old owners, they uh…SBA was forbiddento take any more Ausaid projects, they were forbidden from accepting any more contracts,because they had taken too many and not completed them. So the office of rural developmentbanned them from new contracts. But then the road contract to going to Timbunke, to upgradethe road, and this was supposed to be done in the name of the two men who owned the moilstation, and it was supposed to be completed in three months, but they finished it in a fewweeks, just grading it, that’s all. Not all the way through. So they got 150 million (?) for that.128