Papua New Guinea Government has described a recent report on logging in the country as ‘half baked’ and not true. Source: PNG Today
The report by the US based think tank, the Oakland Institute titled The Great Timber Heist: The Logging Industry in Papua New Guinea highlighted massive tax evasion and financial misreporting by foreign logging companies, allegedly resulting in non payment of hundreds of millions of Kina in taxes.
Forest Minister, Douglas Tomuriesa, said the report paintsa bad picture about the good work done by the Forest Authority.
“One of the branding factors that they put as, we have five million cubic metres of logs been exported out of country and that is never true. You know the highest was back in 2014 was 3.8 million cubic metres of log.
In 2014 was 3.4 million cubic metres.
So we have reduced by point 4 million cubic metres…This year it could be even further down”.
The Forest Authority in addressing the issue of PNG’s logging industry engaging in tax evasions, said that the Log Export Tax is in place to ensure operators pay tax irrespective of whether they make profit or not.
