Locked the Front Door, Opened the Back Door

by PAUL L. KEBAIJA

Ten days is the gap between the afternoon Parliament passed three anti-money laundering bills and the review at which Financial Action Task Force assessors sit down to judge whether Papua New Guinea has met its commitments. Two hundred days separate the grey-listing in February from the legislation. The sequence tells you who these laws were written for.

They were not written for Papua New Guineans. They were written for a review calendar.

Consider how they passed. Three bills, given notice in the morning, through all three readings the same afternoon, on the voices, without a division and without a committee stage. The Attorney-General delivered one second-reading speech, and when the Criminal Code and United Nations Financial Sanctions bills came on, told the House the statement already covered them. New criminal offences. Corporate liability for corruption. The criminalisation of proliferation financing. All of it enacted without a minister explaining it and without a single member debating it.

Parliament did not scrutinise this package. It processed it.

The record it was legislating against came from the floor. Since 2015, more than 10,000 reports registered. Around 5,000 referred on to police, the central bank, ICAC and the IRC. Fewer than two successful prosecutions. Eleven years, five thousand referrals, two results. The Opposition Leader's version of the same failure was 18,000 transactions and 39 investigations. Nobody in the chamber could say which figure was right, which is its own indictment.

Against that record, the first bill's answer is more reports. It widens the grounds on which a bank must form suspicion and file. It adds paper to the top of a pipeline the Police Minister described, in the same debate, as already buried. Five thousand undigested referrals, he said, will not produce five thousand prosecutions. He is right. His government has just legislated for more of them. Not one clause adds an investigator, a prosecutor or a kina to the end of the process that has failed for a decade. One governor put the national complement assigned to transnational crime at fewer than thirty officers.

Worse, the two ministers responsible cannot agree on what they passed. The Attorney-General told the House the bills extend due diligence to politically exposed persons and widen the reporting trigger. The Police Minister told the same House, the same day, that the amendments compel lawyers, accountants and real estate agents to report, force companies to disclose their beneficial owners, cut the freezing window from ninety days to seventy-two hours, and regulate cryptocurrency. Those are not descriptions of the same law.

That is not a debating point. If beneficial ownership disclosure is absent, the flagship provision is unworkable by design: banks are ordered to identify the politician behind a company with nowhere authoritative to look. If obligations on real estate agents are absent, the channel members named again and again in the debate, property, hotels, gated communities, is left open. The grey list may still be exited. The laundering will continue.

And where the law points, it points downward. It burdens a bank officer. It burdens nobody senior. The Opposition Leader told Parliament that FASU has made findings against the Governor of the Bank of Papua New Guinea, who remains in office. Take that allegation at whatever value it deserves. It describes the precise case these provisions imagine, and the package contains nothing that would force an outcome.

The same sitting then moved the warranting power out of Treasury. In one afternoon, Parliament tightened the door on money entering the banks and unlocked the one on money leaving the public account.

The Prime Minister will now send a delegation to argue that a cash economy deserves a lighter standard. He should be careful what he asks for. He is describing the easiest place in the country to hide money, and requesting an exemption for it.

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