Today's Sunday Times newspaper carries an article entitled Sandline 'paid bribe' to win war contract. Alongside this, the principal feature in The Sunday Times Magazine is devoted to Sandline's 1997 contract with Papua New Guinea, rehashing stale and unfounded allegations of corrupt payments. The magazine feature, entitled "The Private War of Tumbledown Tim" and, more sensationally, "Death and Dollars", is not available on the Times' website.
The first paragraph of the news article states that "Sandline .... has been accused of bribing officials to secure a $36m contact [with PNG]". The article suggests that these accusations are new and gives them prominence by leading with the headline that the company 'paid bribe' (note that the wording is presented as a quote from a third party source, implying that the paper is not willing to make the allegation itself, presumably for legal reasons). In fact, this allegation was made by the second PNG Commission of Inquiry nearly three years ago and is certainly not news. Furthermore, the Inquiry was unable to provide any tangible proof to support their conclusion, which is hardly surprising as no such payments were made and, therefore, there is no evidence.
In a letter to the Sunday Times, in response to a series of questions put to the company some months prior to publication of the report, Sandline's lawyers made the following statements addressing the allegation:
"The investigating Judge clearly lacks any commercial experience and, as his conduct of the Inquiry demonstrated, little concept of how to produce a fair and balanced judicial report. The Commission .... reached a conclusion, but have not provided a shred of evidence to support it. They have drawn the conclusion based on conjecture. Even over two years later, there is still absolutely no evidence to support their conclusion. Why? Because none exists.
"It should be remembered that the only person involved in the Sandline contract with PNG to have been proven to have received illicit payments is General Singirok, originally a major supporter of the employment of Sandline and subsequently the very man who misled his nation by denouncing the contract as 'corrupt'. [In March 2000] a judicial inquiry recommended General Singirok's dismissal from the PNG defence force because of his corruption. He also faces a hearing on a charge of sedition later this year."
In the second paragraph of the article The Sunday Times goes on to say that it "has found evidence that Tim Spicer .... misled the foreign affairs select committee over the ownership and control of the company". This evidence is that "[Tony] Buckingham had influence on and probably ultimate control of Sandline's business through a maze of company ownerships, discretionary trusts and nominee directorships" - a maze which will be as much news to Mr Buckingham as to any reader of the article.
Turning to the feature report in the magazine, which is also the source of the above news story, it would be pointless attempting to deal with the numerous erroneous allegations, speculation, supposition, conjecture, innuendo and material omissions as these arise from the author's selective reporting and arranging of facts to suit his pre-determined perspective - to illustrate this we have provided a single example of his selectivity at the end of this comment piece. However, to ensure that any future report or analysis which draws on the feature is accurate, we have addressed below the more blatant factual inaccuracies that appeared in the report, despite both the author's apparent extensive research and Sandline offering to answer any question posed by him:
Page 42, Col 1: "Hansard Management, another Buckingham company ....". Hansard Management is a trust company owned and run independently. Tony Buckingham does not and never has had any equity, other financial or management interest in it. The shareholders of Hansard Management are a matter of public record. A simple check at the equivalent of the Registrar of Companies in Guernsey would have confirmed the company's independent ownership.
Page 43, Col 2: "When the draft contract arrived several days later, it made it clear that the $36m covered only the first three months of Sandline's operation, and another $36m would have to be paid every three months beyond that timescale". In fact, the contract - which has been widely published on the Internet - was to be performed over a single three month timeframe; it did not contain any automatic or mandatory renewal clauses. This fact could easily have been checked by the author. A supplementary proposal was submitted for the provision of further training and support services after the initial contracted period had expired and this was costed at under $1m per month. Therefore, if this option had subsequently been taken up, the total expenditure over 12 months would have come to less than $45m and not the misleading figure of "nearly $150m" as stated in the report.
Page 44, Col 1: "For two days the Papuan special forces unit refused to undergo training .... when Bougainville islanders, loyal to the Papua New Guinea government, were hired by [Sandline] as guides. [They] regarded this as a clear breach of security. But their sense of outrage was fuelled, according to one witness, when a senior [Sandline] mercenary informed him: 'Don't worry, when we have finished we will eliminate them'". This is pure sensationalist fantasy. Sandline naturally secured vital assistance and valuable intelligence for planning purposes from a variety of sources, including ex-Bougainvillean islanders. The company is not in the business of "eliminating" people - this is best left to works of fiction. For the author to rely on a single, clearly biased and probably bitter, source for this allegation is an indication of his desperation to find evidence supporting his perspective.
Page 44, Col 2: "Without the crucial information from Sandline's bank account in Hong Kong, the first Papua New Guinea commission of inquiry made little progress". This is untrue: the first Commission of Inquiry was in possession of a fully itemised list of every payment made from the Hong Kong account. It had ample opportunity to investigate all the payments made by the company and, indeed, sought to do so.
It is unfortunate that valuable space in a leading newspaper like The Sunday Times is made available to present flawed and unbalanced stories based upon selective reporting of the facts with the clear objective of prejudicing the views of the reader.
A simple example of this is the presentation of material relating to the payment made by Sandline to Mr Sabumei. The author reports that the Inquiry concluded "This commission believes that Mr Ijape [the then incumbent Minister of Defence] received payment from Sandline through Sabumei. We do not know whether Benias Sabumei kept some of the money for himself but we find that the money, meaning the $500,000 paid by Sandline [as a fee of less than 1.5 per cent of the contract value for helping to facilitate the business opportunity] to the credit of Sabumei's Citibank account in Brisbane, was meant for Mathias Ijape". What the author chooses to ignore (no doubt because it did not fit with his portrayal of the story) is information to which he not only had access, but which was also reiterated in our lawyer's letter, that "the only payment that linked Mr Sabumei and Mr Ijape was a cheque paid by Mr Sabumei to a printing company for the printing of re-election posters for Mr Ijape in the amount of Kina 10,000 (less than £3,000 at the time)". Hardly a sufficient sum to justify the author's reliance on the Inquiry's somewhat wild assertion. This is just one example of how the reported facts have been selected to fit the conclusions.