The Middleman in the Chair
by PAUL L. KEBAIJA
On 10 September 2025, the Governor-General opened the new Waigani National Court Complex, fifteen courtrooms, thirty-one judges' chambers, a building the Chief Justice called the institutional heart of justice in Papua New Guinea. Its final cost was K680 million. It had been budgeted at K450 million.
There is a man who says he is owed K42 million out of that building. He is now the Minister for Petroleum.
Jimmy Maladina, MP for Esa'ala, of Pangu Pati, is a lawyer educated at UPNG and the University of Sydney. He entered Parliament for the first time in 2022, unseating the sitting member, Davis Steven. Within months the Prime Minister had elevated him to Vice-Minister for State Negotiations. He now holds the petroleum portfolio outright. In July this year he convened the Papua LNG Development Forum at APEC Haus, the statutory process under the Oil and Gas Act that must be completed before benefit-sharing on a project of roughly US$14.5 billion can be settled. Before 2022, Jimmy Maladina's documented career consisted in substantial part of standing between the State and companies that wanted work from it, and being paid for the position. That is not our characterisation. It is what a National Court judge, two commissions of inquiry and the Public Accounts Committee have put on the record about him.
The National Provident Fund
The NPF Commission of Inquiry reported in 2002 on the systematic looting of the retirement savings of ordinary Papua New Guinean workers. Jimmy Maladina, then Chairman of the NPF Board, sits at the centre of its findings. One strand concerned Waim No. 92, a company the Commission found Maladina secretly owned. It obtained a state lease over land at Waigani on extraordinary terms, the purchase price reduced by more than K1.1 million and the annual rent cut from around K143,000 to roughly K17,000. The Commission concluded that Land Board chairman Ralph Guise and Lands Minister Viviso Seravo had been bribed to secure it, and that the incoming Lands Minister, Fabian Pok, was subsequently brought in too: a motor vehicle, K10,000, and a further K220,000 paid to his company from a Maladina-linked vehicle registered in Hong Kong. The Commission recommended the last of these to the Ombudsman Commission for investigation.
A second strand ran through the valuer Iori Veraga, who charged excessive fees to the NPF and inflated the value of land Maladina intended to on-sell to the fund. Veraga was convicted in 2005 on six counts of conspiracy and misappropriation and sentenced to six years' hard labour. The court found Veraga had personally taken about K27,000 and Maladina about K117,500, and that Veraga's role had been secondary. Justice Sakora described Maladina as the "manipulative member of the conspiratorial criminal cabal", the one who called the shots, who pulled the strings. The judge also observed that Maladina appeared to have the ear of the movers and shakers at the highest levels of government. Veraga went to gaol. Maladina was never prosecuted on that conspiracy at all.
He was convicted on a separate one. As Chairman of the NPF Board, he defrauded the fund of K2.65 million by arranging overpayments on the construction of the NPF tower, that is, he stole from the institution he chaired. The conviction took more than a decade to reach sentencing, delayed first by his relocation to Australia and then by a succession of legal challenges, with prosecutors showing little urgency. By the time the court came to sentence, it weighed the delay, the fact that the money had been repaid, and the fact that none of his co-conspirators had ever been charged. He received a suspended sentence and a two-year good behaviour bond.
Two details attach to that outcome. The K2.65 million in restitution was not paid by Maladina. It came from Isles Builders and Contractors Limited, a shelf company headquartered at the China Jiangsu International Building in Kokopo, whose shareholder also holds a substantial stake in China Jiangsu International (PNG) Limited — the balance being held by a Chinese state entity. The benefactor later characterised the payment as consultancy fees owed to Maladina. And the conviction itself, which a pre-sentence report records Maladina admitting to and expressing remorse for, was afterwards quashed by the Supreme Court on the ground of insufficient evidence.
Alotau, 1999
The NPF is not the only inquiry to place Maladina inside a fraudulent land transaction. Land Board Meeting No. 2017 purportedly awarded a 99-year state lease over waterfront land at Alotau to PNG Deep Sea Fishing Limited. Evidence before the Public Accounts Committee, the Finance Department Commission of Inquiry and the National Court indicates the meeting never occurred. The PAC described it as the most blatant instance of fraud and criminal activity by the Land Board and certain of its members that it had encountered. It is alleged Guise was bribed again; documentary evidence indicates PNG Deep Sea Fishing was controlled at the time by Maladina and his wife.
When the Milne Bay Provincial Government moved to recover the land for the people of the province, Maladina and his wife formally acquired the company's shares and litigated for seven years, conceding only in 2014. The judge was sufficiently unimpressed with the conduct of the claim to award costs against him on a punitive solicitor–client basis.
Three separate public inquiries found the meeting tainted by fraud. There is no record of any police investigation. No charge was ever laid.
UBS, 2014
The Commission of Inquiry into the UBS loan examined the transaction that cost Papua New Guinean taxpayers K862 million. Among the small group who profited from it was Jimmy Maladina, paid K1 million by the State through Pacific Legal Group, where he was engaged as a consultant. The Commission recorded the payment as being described both as a referral fee and as a fee for services. Counsel assisting the inquiry noted they could find no evidence of work by him that would justify a sum of that size, and that his own explanation rested on a longer period of engagement.
The court complex
In 2015 Maladina's wholly owned company Flavalea Limited signed a referral agreement with China Railway Construction Engineering Company. Its terms were straightforward: ten per cent of the value of any work Flavalea secured for the Chinese firm. China Railway then won the contract to build the Waigani court complex, priced at K427 million. Ten per cent of that is close to the K42 million Maladina says he is owed.
China Railway does not dispute that the agreement exists. Its case, on court file, is that its then managing director signed under duress, having been told that if he refused, Maladina would use his contacts on the tender bid screening committee to have the company eliminated at the early stage of bidding. That is an allegation of extortion made against a sitting Member of Parliament by a contractor holding billions of kina in PNG public work. It has never been tested. It has also never been investigated.
The firm making it is not a marginal player. China Railway has held contracts to upgrade the Highlands Highway and develop special economic zones, together reported in the billions of US dollars. It built the Noble Centre on the Port Moresby waterfront, the UPNG Games Hall, NCD City Hall and the Prime Minister's office building. The Noble tower was declared uninhabitable by regulators over defects described as non-compliant and dangerous before eventually being remediated and opened. Both China Railway and China Jiangsu have been blacklisted by the World Bank over procurement conduct.
The pattern, and the office
There is no live criminal proceeding against Jimmy Maladina. The NPF tower conviction was overturned. The Flavalea claim is a civil dispute. The bribery findings of the NPF Commission, the Finance Commission and the Public Accounts Committee were the findings of inquiries, not of criminal courts, and no prosecution followed from any of them.
That last fact is the one worth sitting with. Across four inquiries spanning fifteen years, the consistent finding is not merely that Maladina was involved in transactions that harmed the public. It is that the machinery meant to follow such findings never moved. A valuer went to prison; the man the court said was pulling his strings did not. A Land Board meeting was found not to have happened; nobody was charged over the lease it produced. A K1 million payment with no identifiable work behind it was recorded by a commission of inquiry; nothing followed. A contractor alleged extortion in open court; no file was opened.
Meanwhile the man at the centre of that record has been given the ministry that decides how PNG's second LNG project is licensed and how its benefits are apportioned among landowners in Gulf, Central and beyond. He determines who sits at the forum table. He has already ruled that any party challenging the legality of the process in court will not be permitted to participate in it. The final investment decision he is stewarding has slipped repeatedly, predicted for 2020, then 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, then April 2026, then September 2026.
The question for the voters of Esa'ala, and for the country that must live with whatever is negotiated in Port Moresby this year, is not whether Jimmy Maladina has been convicted of anything. It is whether a public record this thoroughly documented, by judges, by commissioners, by a parliamentary committee, ought ever to have led to this particular chair.
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*Mr Maladina has previously denied wrongdoing in these matters. This publication has written to his office seeking comment and will publish any response in full.*
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