Sack the Minister: SME Corruption Exposes Theft of Public Money
By: Hon. James Nomane
Thursday, 25 June 2026
Papua New Guinea New Guinea's small and medium enterprise programme — conceived to lift ordinary citizens out of poverty and build a productive private sector — has been comprehensively pillaged. Thanks to whistleblowers, the Opposition has received documentary evidence that reveals a pattern of fraud, cronyism, and kleptocracy so brazen that it demands immediate criminal investigation and the sacking of the responsible Minister.
Whilst the country has missed out on SME support as a priority program under the Marape government, the hundreds of millions in budget appropriation in every budget cycle have gone to the hands of a few: relatives, cronies, and political allies. Funding that could have grown the economy has been sadly consumed by the “kaikai man”.
The evidence is damning, documented, and undeniable. Payment registers obtained by this office reveal millions of kina disbursed to entities that are defunct on IPA records, to household staff of ministers' wives, to companies bearing the names of senior public servants and their immediate family members, and to single vendors receiving repeat payments totalling hundreds of thousands of kina — while genuine SMEs across our 22 provinces and 96 districts waited, and waited, and were denied.
Among the most egregious findings: a household worker of a Minister's wife received over K1 million through a shell company. A defunct IPA-registered entity received nearly K5 million in two equal cheque payments. A senior public servant used a family-registered SME to pay himself over K1.3 million in public funds. These are not accounting errors. These are crimes. They represent a systematic looting of a programme designed for the most vulnerable citizens of this nation — our market vendors, our village farmers, our young graduates trying to start a business.
The Opposition calls on the Prime Minister to immediately sack the Minister responsible for the Department of Commerce and the SME program, pending a full police fraud investigation by the National Fraud and Anti-Corruption Directorate. We further demand that the Office of the Auditor-General conduct an urgent forensic audit of every payment disbursed under this programme, and that the findings be tabled in Parliament without delay.
This Government promised SME empowerment. It delivered self-enrichment. It promised economic transformation. It delivered a kleptocracy dressed in the language of development. Every kina stolen from the SME programme is a kina taken from a mother in Simbu, a farmer in Sepik, a young entrepreneur in Manus who had the courage to dream but was denied the opportunity to build. The people of Papua New Guinea deserve better. The response by the Prime Minister must be swift and severe to match the level of theft that has taken place right under his nose.
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#SMECorruption #SackTheMinister #StopTheTheftPNG #JusticeForSMEs #PNGDeservesBetter
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