In a country plagued by corruption, where politicians are seemingly more concerned with making personal profits that serving the nation, and where the law enforcement agencies are brutally under resourced, a new online database is poised to shake up the status quo and offer some hope to a beleaguered population.
Corruption thrives in Papua New Guinea because there is so little public access to information but now that is changing.
PNGi Portal is a groundbreaking online resource that provides access to both the details of company ownership and more than 20 years of anti-corruption investigations by government agencies.
Lawyers, journalists, academics and the public can now see who owns the companies that are being awarded dubious government contracts , they can track where politicians and public servants have been citied in official inquiries and they can link and cross reference the two sets of data.
Interested in a Paul Paraka? Just type the name and, with one click of a mouse, you can see that it appears in the company records of a long list of companies, including Klinki Rain Forest Limited, Kumu Builders, Kumu Construction, PB and Venna Ltd, PJ and Sons, PKP Consultancy Services, PKP Nominees, PPL Investments, PPM & Kids, PW & Kids, Siane No.s 1,2,3 and 4 and more…
But that is not all, you can also see the name Paul Paraka appears in twenty-two documents in the database of more than 500 reports, and with one click you can view not only the document but the very pages where the name appears!
All this is available to anyone via the internet and access is free.
Whether you are a lawyer or company executive interested in doing due diligence on a new client, potential business opportunity or an investment; a journalist writing a story in which an MP or a company features; a police officer investigating a potential crime; an academic or student researching a particular topic; or just a curious member of the public, the PNGi Portal provides access to a wealth of information that was previously inaccessible or completely hidden.
But the PNGi Portal does not stand alone, it has a sister website, PNGi Central, that demonstrates the functionality and power of the information available via the portal.
PNGi Central is a reporting hub that presents, in a range of different formats, the results of investigations by a network of journalists and academics. They are using the PNGi Portal to investigate not only corrupt deals but also the hidden and opaque systems of political and economic power that nurture and sustain them.
