Papua New Guinea has five months remaining to fix its anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing (AML/CTF) systems or face the severe repercussions of being placed on the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) “grey list”.

The FATF has imposed an October 2025 deadline, and the government is scrambling to prove its commitment to global partners.

Speaking in Parliament, Prime Minister James Marape said Treasury Minister, Ian Ling-Stuckey had been given the responsibility to lead a taskforce to fix PNG’s issues associated with money laundering and terrorist financing.

• READ MORE: Other PNG crime reports

“I summoned all agency heads to a critical meeting last week giving them clear direction, in no uncertain terms, that they work day and night to avert the possibility of us getting grey listed,” Marape said.

“This review comes around every five years.

“We have only three or four areas that are outstanding that we must dispatch forthwith.”

PNG is no stranger to the FATF grey list, having been placed under increased monitoring in 2014 before successfully being removed in 2016.

Deficiencies highlighted
However, a recent assessment by the Asia Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) highlighted ongoing deficiencies, particularly in the effectiveness of PNG’s AML/CTF regime.

While the country has made strides in establishing the necessary laws and regulations (technical compliance), the real challenge lies in PNG’s implementation and enforcement.

The core of the problem, according to analysts, is a lack of effective prosecution and punishment for money laundering and terrorism financing.

High-risk sectors such as corruption, fraud against government programmes, illegal logging, illicit fishing, and tax evasion, remain largely unchecked by successful legal actions.

Capacity gaps within key agencies like the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary and the Office of the Public Prosecutor have been cited as significant hurdles.

Recent drug hauls have also highlighted existing flaws in detection in the country’s financial systems.

The implications of greylisting are far-reaching and potentially devastating for a developing nation like PNG, which is heavily reliant on foreign investment and international financial flows.

Impact on economy
Deputy Opposition leader James Nomane warned in Parliament that greylisting “will severely affect the economy, investor confidence, and make things worse for Papua New Guinea with respect to inflationary pressures, the cost of imports, and a whole host of issues”.

If PNG is greylisted, the immediate economic fallout could be substantial. It would signal to global financial institutions that PNG carries a heightened risk for financial crimes, potentially leading to a sharp decline in foreign direct investment.

Critical resource projects, including Papua LNG, P’nyang LNG, Wafi-Golpu, and Frieda River Mines, could face delays or even be halted as investors become wary of the increased financial and reputational risks.

Beyond investment, the cost of doing business in PNG could also rise. International correspondent banks, vital conduits for cross-border transactions, may de-risk by cutting ties or scaling back operations with PNG financial institutions.

This “de-risking” could make it more expensive and complex for businesses and individuals alike to conduct international transactions, leading to higher fees and increased scrutiny.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Despite changing his citizenship to the Pacific state of Vanuatu, a Chinese man wanted for various economic crimes was arrested at Ninoy Aquino International Airport last week as he was about to board a flight for Singapore.

In a statement yesterday, the Philippine Bureau of Immigration Commissioner Norman Tansingco said Liu Jiangtao, 42, had presented himself for departure clearance at the immigration counter when the officer processing him saw that his name was on the bureau’s list of aliens with outstanding watchlist orders.

Records showed that Liu is one of 11 Chinese fugitives wanted for fraud, infringement of credit card management, capital embezzlement, money laundering and counterfeiting a registered trademark.

Bureau of Immigration prosecutors have filed deportation cases against the 11 fugitives.

Evelyn Macairan is a reporter of The Philippine Star.

Transparency International Papua New Guinea has welcomed the conviction of lawyer Paul Paraka as the police confirm they are widening the investigation into the fraud case.

The NGO admits the depths of Paraka’s activities, revealed by the case, are very worrying.

Paraka, who had operated his own eponymous law firm, was convicted of misappropriating 162 million kina (about NZ$75 million) in government funds, between 2007 and 2011.

• READ MORE:  PNG lawyer Paraka found guilty of misappropriating K162m
• Other Paul Paraka reports

Transparency PNG spokesperson, Peter Aitsi, said the evidence outlined the complex structures that Paraka and others put together.

Significant case
He said it was a very significant case because of the amount of public money involved.

“And those are just the funds that have been identified within this case itself and paid to different parties as a result of Paraka’s activities.

“From a TI point of view we would encourage the agencies to continue to develop the evidence and if there are further charges to be laid against individuals then we would encourage them to ensure they uphold their duty and responsibility,” Aitsi said.

Paraka’s law firm, which he claimed was the biggest in the country, was engaged by the Attorney-General and Solicitor-General’s office in 2000, but this arrangement ceased in 2006.

However, from 2007 the state was still making payments to legal firms linked to Paraka.

Investigations have seesawed for 10 years and led to the replacement of the Attorney-General, the shutting down of the police fraud unit investigating the matter, and acccusations of politicians being involved.

Meanwhile, Paul Paraka threatened legal action amid claims the issues were simply administrative matters.

Police action
Police Commissioner David Manning has confirmed an investigation into fraud, money laundering and misappropriation following Paraka’s conviction.

Manning said the Paraka case attracted significant national interest due to the huge amounts of public money involved in these corrupt dealings.

“The way and manner in which these funds were syphoned through the Department of Finance to various law firms, who would then transfer this money to Mr Paraka himself, has been the subject of public outrage,” he said.

Manning said police will continue to pursue, investigate, charge and arrest those involved, and to recoup all money lost in these illegal deals.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A recent revival of local prime-time TV documentaries has highlighted some thorny social issues and raised awkward questions about justice and equality.

Among them was a revealing investigation this week showing the cost of white-collar crime dwarfs that of welfare fraud, but draws lighter punishments and gets a lot less scrutiny in the media than the kind of crimes that play out in public.

For years, the heyday of New Zealand TV documentary and current affairs seemed to be in the past.

• LISTEN TO RNZ MEDIAWATCH: ‘Uncovering injustice and inequities’

Gone are the days of Mike McRoberts’ mellifluous voice introducing local investigative stories on 60 Minutes after a few seconds of distinctive clock-ticking. The popular franchise stopped producing local content some years ago.

20/20, while still on air, mainly releases repackaged content from the US these days and in spite of the continuing long-form journalism of TVNZ’s Sunday, documentaries have been fading from New Zealand screens for some time.

Lately though, TVNZ has revived the strand Documentary New Zealand with a series of eight new NZ On Air-funded films for TVNZ1 on Tuesday nights between Eat Well For Less and Coronation Street, and on the on-demand service TVNZ+.

Among the most engaging and often moving ones was No Māori Allowed, which aired last week.

Pukekohe discrimination
The documentary delves into the history of Pukekohe, where for decades Māori were subject to discrimination and sometimes, violence.

It deftly navigates several tensions — first between local Pākehā and Māori who lived though an era of segregated movie theatres, but also between the people trying to bring the area’s past to light and the kuia and kaumatua who lived through it, and still bear the scars.

While No Māori Allowed highlighted historic racism and the legacy it has left, this week’s documentary Crime: Need vs Greed trains its eye on a more modern form of racial and economic injustice.

Host Tim McKinnel argues we’ve “sleepwalked” into a $5 billion white collar crime wave of costly fraud and deception offences while the attention of our justice system and media is turned toward often low level street crime.

“While society and the media fixate on gang crimes, ram raids, and other forms of street crime, white collar criminals have been robbing us blind. We’ve sleepwalked into a $5 billion crime wave that no-one wants to talk about. Instead we’re tough on crime and spend billions locking up the poor,” he says in Need vs Greed.

Not only have white collar criminals been robbing us blind — the documentary presents evidence they’ve been getting away with it.

Tax law specialist Lisa Marriot delivers some staggering statistics on the double standard. Her research found people convicted of tax fraud crimes averaging $287,000 have a 22 percent chance of receiving a prison sentence — while those convicted of welfare fraud worth an average of $67,000 are imprisoned 60 percent of the time.

The lack of consequences for white collar crime belies its scale and impact.

$1.7 billion fraud prosecution
A 2014 investigation by New Zealand Herald journalist Matt Nippert helped trigger a $1.7 billion fraud prosecution against the company South Canterbury Finance.

In Crime: Need vs Greed, he says it’s “more than every Treaty settlement combined in New Zealand’s history” or “a hundred years of benefit fraud in one go”.

Given the relative figures involved, it’s worth asking why benefit fraud or street crime like ram raids get so much more attention.

Nippert says part of the reason is obvious: street crime is visceral and a lot more understandable to audiences.

“It’s the comparison between a Jerry Bruckheimer action flick and something much more slow and sedate like a documentary spread across, say, six episodes.

“I think ram raids are quite a violent, shocking act and should be covered. But they are also effectively a pre-scripted sort of action heist movie — with car crashes and getaways and splitting the loot — all condensed down to this one moment of action.

“But the white collar financial crimes often occur very subtly, very carefully, very deceptively over years, sometimes decades,” he says.

Fraud story legal threats
Fraud stories also pose legal difficulties, partly because the perpetrators can afford to hire lawyers and threaten defamation action.

Nippert is routinely threatened with legal action over his investigations. The Herald‘s lawyers have to check almost everything that he writes.

Meanwhile, street crime is more likely to come before the courts, and reporting on it is less likely to be subject to suppression orders and legal challenges from defendants.

“A lot of reporting comes from courts are a reflection of wider problem,” Nippert says.

“You will tend to get far more disadvantaged people in the District Court facing charges. On the other side of it, when you’re looking at sort of white collar crimes . . . I’ve run into suppression orders many, many times. So that not only maybe dampens down the reporting, but also slows it down enormously.”

Journalists have been highlighting inequities in the court system recently, with NZME running the Open Justice project and RNZ’s Is This Justice, which revealed — among other things — that Pākehā are discharged without conviction and granted name suppression at higher rates than Māori, that 90 percent of High Court and Court of Appeal judges are Pākehā, and that judges could be presiding over the cases of people they know.

Human brain ‘and zeros’
Another issue contributing to the comparative dearth of fraud reporting is that the “human brain does funny things when it sees zeroes,” Nippert says.

“The difference between $10 million and $100 million becomes quite ethereal. But everyone can understand what $1000 in the hand looks like.”

Despite the inherent disadvantages fraud stories have in a click-based media economy, Nippert says more reporters should cover them because of the huge costs these crimes impose on victims and society.

That might mean doing a basic accountancy paper at university or downloading Google Sheets onto their phone, but the barriers to entry aren’t as high as some reporters might think, he says.

“I used to think I didn’t have that sort of brain [for numbers]. But then I was made redundant and the only job I could get was a business reporter in the NBR and you know, if you give it a go, I think you’ll find it’s a lot more straightforward than you’ve conditioned yourself to fear,” he says.

“It’s important to point out for readers that some of these cases are alarming and we should be paying close attention because that $100 million isn’t just $100 million from some insurance company — that’s likely to be a thousand families who have lost their nest egg, and whose financial future is extraordinarily precarious, probably for the rest of their lives.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A convicted Tongan government minister, ‘Akosita Lavulavu, and her husband ‘Etuate Lavulavu have each been jailed for six years.

They were sentenced today in the Supreme Court after being found guilty on charges of obtaining money by false pretences.

The couple owned and ran the educational institution ‘Unuaki ‘o Tonga Royal Institute. They obtained state funding for the training facility, but kept the money.

• READ MORE: Tongan cabinet minister convicted of major fraud

Supreme Court judge Justice Nicholas Cooper said the couple had a “highly devised plan”, which they committed over about three-years, reports Matangi Tonga.

He said the public money was intended to benefit the children.

The judge said that while ‘Akosita Lavulavu had no previous offences and had pleaded for mercy, she had shown no remorse.

‘Etuate Lavulavu was first elected to Parliament in 2002, but was convicted of bribery in 2016 and forced to resign.

His wife then stepped into his parliamentary shoes.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

A prominent Australian lawyer, Greg Sheppard, has been arrested by Papua New Guinean police and is facing a range of fraud charges.

Sheppard, a principal of Young & Williams Lawyers, was arrested on Tuesday in Port Moresby.

He was charged with two counts of misappropriation and another two counts of money laundering.

• READ MORE: PNG police arrest Australian lawyer on K268m mining trust fund charges
• Other Western Province trust fund reports

Police say the charges relate to Sheppard’s alleged involvement in the transfer of funds amounting to US$14.5 million (52 million kina) in 2018.

These funds were part of the US$75 million (K268 million) that were unlawfully withdrawn from a trust fund established to finance development projects in PNG’s Western province, the Western Province People’s Dividends Trust Account.

Sheppard, 65, was previously arrested and charged by PNG police in January in relation to the same criminal investigation.

At the time he was charged with two counts of conspiracy and another two counts of false pretence.

So far, the defendant has been charged with a total of eight offences.

Sheppard has done extensive work in PNG over recent years, recently representing the country’s former Prime Minister Peter O’Neill and Opposition Leader Belden Namah among other prominent leaders.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Papua New Guinea’s Education Secretary Dr Uke Kombra says 620 elementary school teachers have been deregistered after it was found that they had enrolled in teachers colleges through fraudulent means.

He confirmed that Education Department officials discovered after a thorough vetting of teachers’ qualifications that the teachers had used other people’s certificates to enter the teachers training institutions.

“A week ago we deregistered 620 elementary teachers around the country,” he said.

• READ MORE: ‘Don’t turn away any student’, Marape tells PNG schools

“We found that 620 of them had fraudulently enrolled themselves in [teacher training] colleges.”

He said it was later discovered after proper vetting of their education background that the certificates they used to enter the colleges were not genuine.

“They altered certificates to get into teachers colleges and be trained as teachers,” he said.

“They will no longer be teachers in our education system.

‘We are very serious’
“We are very serious in the Department of Education to ensure that we give quality education to every child.

“And the teachers are a very critical and important element in the teaching and learning of children.”

Kombra said the department had to make sure that anyone wanting to become a teacher should achieve the level of academic excellence needed to be trained as one.

“They must have the right attitude in the classroom, so they can teach children to be good citizens and have a good future,” he said.

“We are very serious about ensuring that we have quality teacher training programmes in colleges and ensure that those who graduate and come into the classroom have to perform their responsibilities as expected of them.

“This is all for the benefit of our children.”

Deregistration certificates
The 620 teachers:

• WILL receive deregistration certificates terminating their employment as teachers in a school under the national education system;
• CANNOT be appointed to any teaching position by all appointing authorities;
• CANNOT be readmitted by the Teaching Service Commission; and
• TAKEN off the government payroll.

The 2021 academic year has begun with the government instructing all schools to enroll all students irrespective of whether they have paid any fees.

The government is paying 63 percent of student fees while the parents will foot the remaining 37 percent.

Asia Pacific Report republishes The National articles with permission.

Papua New Guinea’s Police Commissioner David Manning has promised that the full force of the law and all resources at the Constabulary’s disposal will be used against policemen who flout the law and help criminals.

Commissioner Manning’s warning followed recent threats against police detectives investigating a K286 million (NZ$105 million) fraud involving Ok Tedi trust funds.

“We had two threats issued against police detectives,” he said.

• READ MORE: PNG police arrest Australian lawyer on K268m mining trust fund charges

“Criminals and policemen are involved.

“I will not stand for this and whether you are a criminal or a policeman who decides to engage or attack policemen, you will be dealt with equally under lawful means.

“If you want to be a criminal or align yourself with individuals or entities and challenge the police, then you have no place in the police force and I will ensure your speedy exit … straight into prison.”

Commissioner Manning said reports of policemen continuously being deployed to provide protection for logging camps or private businesses with the full knowledge and authority of their superiors would be investigated and dealt with.

Policemen ‘denying rights to justice’
“In these instances, police resources, including firearms, are being used by these policemen to protect the interest of a few, thereby denying the rights of the majority to seek justice,” he said.

“The police force will undergo beneficial change, and those currently opposing these changes for their own reasons will be weeded out.

“The majority of policemen and women perform their duties with professionalism and dedication, yet we and the country are being let down by these few members.

“The proposed changes in the disciplinary proceedings will allow for a swifter and more effective process that protects all parties concerned whilst enhancing greater accountability and appropriate penalties being dealt out.

“In the near future, legislative amendments will be made to criminalise certain offences that have caused the discipline and performance of the police force to deteriorate.

“If we are to deliver to the people of PNG a police force that they deserve and provide a policing service that adds value to their lives, we must undergo these reforms and remove impediments now.”

Asia Pacific Report republishes The National articles with permission.

The 77 Chinese citizens deported from Fiji by uniformed Chinese police in August were sex workers, according to an investigative report by the Australia Broadcasting Corporation.

The ABC’s Background Briefing investigation by Hagar Cohen has reported an unnamed source challenging official claims that the deported individuals were involved in an online gambling fraud ring, reports Fiji Newswire.

According to the ABC investigative report, Police Commissioner Sitiveni Qiliho declined to comment on the allegations.

The Office of the Prime Minister and the Chinese Embassy in Suva did not reply to the ABC’s requests.

The ABC reported that the deportees were “mainly young women brought to Fiji to service the Chinese diaspora,” and those locals close to their Nadi house said the inhabitants were primarily young women aged between 15 and 19.

One of those deportees was a young mother with a baby.

LISTEN: Fiji Silenced – China’s secret mission exposed on Sunday Extra: Background Briefing (Part 1)

In the two weeks before their removal, witnesses reported seeing Fijian police officers moving in and out of the compound — including movements that resembled a changing of the guard, and overnight shifts.

According to one local, who asked not to be identified, several of the women had attempted to escape but were chased and caught by local police.

• Chinese police grab 77 suspected fraudsters from Fiji
• Fiji police finally admit deportation, reveal little else

Greenpeace NZ climate campaigner Simon Boxer said today the report from the Morgan Foundation was proof that New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), a policy which allows companies to offset their pollution by buying ‘carbon credits’ from other companies that pollute less, was “nothing but hot air”.

“It’s a total bloody waste of time. The ETS was a policy that was purposefully made to sound boring and dense so people wouldn’t dig deeper into it,” he said.

“But the reality is it doesn’t clean up pollution at all – in fact it actually allows businesses to make a profit from pollution. Under the National government, this scheme is a scam.

“It’s a climate crime.”

Complicit dealings
The Morgan Foundation report, called Climate Cheats, outlines how the New Zealand government has been complicit in the dealing of fraudulent carbon credits manufactured by organised crime in Russia and Ukraine.

The countries use loopholes in international rules to create millions of false carbon credits that have no environmental benefit, and then sell them at bargain rates to the world market.

The European Union banned trade in these dodgy credits in 2013, but Boxer said New Zealand had continued to use them because they were cheap, despite the government knowing they were fraudulent.

Even worse, he said, was the fact that the use of these credits was one of the ways the NZ government planned to meet its climate targets for 2020.

“It’s another excuse for John Key to sit back, relax and do what he does best – which is absolutely nothing,” Boxer said.

“If he was serious about the communities he represents, he would do real-life things like shut the coal burners at Huntly Power Station and promote renewable energy like wind and solar.

“He would be backing green farming, rather than driving huge and costly irrigation schemes, which industrialise our farms, bankrupt New Zealand’s farmers, and allow our rivers and lakes to become so dirty they could make you sick.

“Most importantly, if he were a decent bloke, Key would not allow our environmental policy to be driven by a scam scheme that implicates us all in the heart of a global scandal.”

The Morgan Foundation report comes mere weeks after the release of the Panama Papers, which show New Zealand’s lax tax laws make it a pseudo tax-haven for foreign companies.

• Morgan Foundation ‘Climate cheats’ report
• Report accuses NZ government of being ‘climate cheats’