Fair shares for all

Pim Opinion

The recent predicament of Sir Julius Chan in Port Moresby will not have gone unnoticed elsewhere.

For every businesman-politician in the region risks the same treatment almost every day.

Sir Julius Chan’s defence that, as a businessman, he would have been foolish to pass up an opportunity to buy shares in Placer Pacific Ltd at a bargain price (within months of the company’s launch on the Sydney stock exchange with shares of $1 each, the price had trebled) is, on the surface, reasonable.

But, as always in politics, there are other considera tions.

The facts that Sir Julius is his country’s finance minister, that the PNG government negotiated hard for a large parcel of shares to be allocated within PNG and that he managed to round up more shares than just about anybody else in the country are all highly relevant.

It may also be relevant that several of the share applications with which he was connected were successful in full while most other applicants received only half of their requests for the highly-sought shares.

Now, had Sir Julius been a businessman with no interest in politics and no seat in the cabinet all the above would have passed unremarked.

But, as he well knows, people in public life are expected to behave differently from private citizens.

Rightly or wrongly, people expect their leaders to be above human failing. And to suggest, as a leading Australian newspaper, did that this is less true in undeveloped countries is a throwback to the paternal colonialism that has been widely rejected.

The question, of course, is: Has Sir Julius done anything wrong? It’s easier to ask than answer.

That he has done something at least technically wrong is clear from the country’s leadership code which prohibits leaders buying shares in foreign controlled companies without the prior permission of the Ombuds

man Commission. But he, at least, was open about it unlike others, including some of his critics in government and opposition who, it turns out, had also purchased shares.

That, of course, didn’t stop them from criticising Sir Julius.

Now, however, they’re all in the same boat MPs, judges, public servants and others including the mem bers of the Ombudsman Commission themselves (though one of them acquired his holding before his appointment and can hardly be held culpable for that).

It appears to be a constitutional impasse. If the inquiry finds that all leaders who have bought shares are in breach of the law, it could be possible for the Ombudsman Commission to issue retrospective permis sion for the purchases Under the circumstances that may be the most workable solution. But can the ombudsmen issue such permission to themselves?

And the wider issue is the acceptability or otherwise of MPs being involved in business dealings.

Sir Julius, for example, regarded his investment as just another business opportunity. So, presumably, did his colleagues, although a number of them did not hesitate to join the public outcry that greeted the announcement of Sir Julius’ market activity. But are business dealings the concern of MPs as private citizens or as very public politicians?

In any case, Sir Julius and the other MP’s will answer to the electors, as he has done so often before, and they will give their opinion in next year’s general election.

And, in passing, let’s note that it was Port Moresby’s vigorous free press that first brought the affair to light. Be it also noted that PNG has now signed a treaty of ’’mutual respect, friendship and co-operation” with a country in which that would not have been possible.