Maladina's leak problem is a secrecy problem

by JAMES WAUGLA

Jimmy Maladina has found something about Papua LNG that alarms him more than missed deadlines or deferred tax. Someone outside his circle has read the State's correspondence. In a statement published by The National on 4 November, the Petroleum Minister warned that the disclosure "can compromise the State's position, undermine confidence between negotiating parties and invite speculation". His office, he said, will not authenticate, validate or debate the documents through the media. Speculation is what a government earns when it will not publish.

Papua New Guineans have been asked to take this project on trust since the gas agreement was signed in 2019. That agreement has since been reviewed, reopened and amended. In September it was TotalEnergies, in a press release from Paris, that announced the amended agreement was finalised, that ExxonMobil would take over as operator, and that a marketing joint venture between TotalEnergies and Kumul Petroleum would sell 2.4 million tonnes of LNG a year. The companies across the table hold the documents. The people who own the gas, including the landowners who sat through July's development forum, get statements.

Maladina says the negotiations belong to authorised State representatives bound by fiduciary duties. A fiduciary acts for a beneficiary, and the beneficiaries of Papua LNG are the people of Gulf, Central and the rest of the country, not TotalEnergies or ExxonMobil. A duty owed to the public cannot be discharged by keeping the public uninformed. Confidentiality can protect a live negotiating position. It does not entitle a minister to treat every inconvenient page as a breach. If preliminary positions are being mistaken for final decisions, the cure is simple: publish the final ones.

Maladina's own record of reassurance is why the leak lands so hard. In November 2025 he told Parliament the delays were not the Government's fault and promised: "I will use (my) powers to ensure that the project starts next quarter." That quarter came and went. In February he said the State was working towards a final investment decision this year. In March, Peter O'Neill told him on the floor that the project would already be producing had the original agreements held; Maladina conceded costs had risen and said the final figures were not settled. Now, in November, his own statement describes a project still competing with other LNG developments for capital.

The pattern repeats each time a critic produces a number. When critics put the cost of joint marketing at up to US$2 billion, Maladina said the claim had no credible financial analysis behind it. When the Opposition calculated that the revised fiscal terms would cost the State K28 billion by 2035, he replied on 27 October that the tax was delayed, not lost, because advanced depreciation lets ExxonMobil, Santos, ENEOS and MRDC bring forward deductions against PNG LNG income. Perhaps he is right. But a minister who says the public's arithmetic is wrong, and then refuses to show his own, is asking for trust he has not earned.

He has asked for it before. In October 2025 he promised the Papua LNG process would be managed "with accountability and transparency". Transparency that switches off the moment a document escapes is not transparency. It is public relations.

Maladina is entitled to the Supreme Court's 2016 acquittal in the National Provident Fund case, and nothing here suggests otherwise. But a former NPF chairman whose stewardship of members' money went through a Commission of Inquiry and two courts should understand better than most why the owners of a national asset want to see the paperwork for themselves.

The leak did not compromise the State. Secrecy did, by leaving a US$14.5 billion decision to be argued over fragments. If the deal is as sound as the minister says, he has an easy way to end the speculation. Table the amended gas agreement in Parliament, with any redactions explained. Release the fiscal model behind the K28 billion rebuttal. Publish Kumul's equity financing terms before the final investment decision, not after. Whoever released the correspondence did what the Petroleum Minister would not: treated Papua New Guineans as owners entitled to know what is being signed in their name.