The K3 Million Question, A 2013 Treasury cheque, and the paper trail that surfaced around Rainbo Paita's early career.


by PAUL L.KEBAIJA

A set of parliamentary questions dated for the sitting of Tuesday 8 September 2020 still offers one of the clearer public windows into the unresolved financial questions that have followed Rainbo Paita into high office. The questions, directed to Prime Minister James Marape by the then-Opposition Leader Belden Namah, whose own standing as Opposition Leader was at that time under challenge in the Supreme Court, do not appear in any Hansard or news archive accessible today. They survive as a document and leaked to PNGBlogs, and the document is specific.

In December 2013 the Treasury released a K3 million cheque to PC & M Limited, a consultancy engaged by the National Capital District Commission in 2002 to implement its Youth Employment Scheme. The company's original claim for unpaid invoices covering seven months was said to be K231,000. By 2013 the figure had swollen to K4.986 million, more than twenty times the starting amount, same tactics used by James Marape's cronies with no accounting method, court judgment or interest calculation offered to explain the increase. It is very clear that Marape, then Finance Minister, directed his secretary Steven Gibson to locate funds; and that Gibson wrote to Treasury Secretary Dairi Vele seeking budget savings; and that the cheque was cut on Christmas Eve. The political edge was explicit: Investment Promotion Authority records were said to list the late Paita Towo, Rainbo Paita's uncle (Rainbo's father is Nathan Piari and brother to the late Paita Towo), described in the document as Rainbo Paita's father, a relationship that remains publicly confirmed, as shareholder, and Rainbo Paita himself as the company's managing director when the payment was made. When the questions were drafted, Paita held the Finance portfolio under Marape.

The verifiable scaffolding is limited but solid. Marape was Finance Minister throughout 2013. Paita was Finance Minister in September 2020. Gibson and Vele occupied the offices named. Beyond that, the record goes quiet. The document says its author had initiated a referral to the National Fraud and Anti-Corruption Directorate; no referral, investigation or outcome has ever been publicly confirmed. No cheque butt, IPA extract, Gibson–Vele correspondence or Certificate of Judgment has entered the public domain. Why a national Treasury payment settled what was described as a municipal commission's liability remains unexplained.

None of this establishes that the payment was fraudulent. Papua New Guinea's system for settling claims against the State has long allowed modest invoices to expand through interest, legal costs and political proximity. Certificates of Judgment under the Claims By and Against the State Act oblige the Department of Finance to satisfy endorsed judgments out of available funds while interest continues to run. Auditor-General reports and Public Accounts Committee inquiries have for decades documented weak verification, preferential treatment and funds sourced outside proper appropriations. A K231,000 claim that becomes a multi-million-kina Treasury payment would fit that documented pattern precisely. Pattern is context, not proof of any particular instance.

The same 2012–13 period saw intense scrutiny of large legal settlements through the Finance Department, most notably the payments involving Paul Paraka Lawyers. Marape has consistently stated, in Parliament and in public statements responding to the Paraka proceedings, that as Finance Minister he issued instructions to verify and stop improper payments, and that some continued against those instructions. The existence of systemic problems does not convert every large settlement into personal fraud.

What can be said with confidence is that Paita's trajectory after entering Parliament for Finschhafen in 2017 was rapid: Communications and Energy, then Finance, later National Planning, and periods as Minister Assisting the Prime Minister, punctuated by leading a bloc of MPs into opposition against Marape and eventually returning to cabinet. Such fluidity is common in PNG politics. Marape did get his share as Finance Minister,

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