Three current and former lawyers at Norton Rose Fulbright’s Australian unit are among those facing a potential five-year ban from doing business in Papua New Guinea, for failing to co-operate with the royal commission into a controversial $1.3 billion UBS loan.
Mr Marape, who was finance minister at the time of the loan and appeared as a witness before the commission, pledged to act on the report given the extent of funds lost.“We will give justice to the effort put in by ensuring … that it is progressed beyond parliament.” “It would be open to conclude they intended to deliberately dump about 3000 documents, many lengthy, right at the heel of the hunt,” he told the commission, which has since submitted its final report to Mr Marape.that was used to buy 10 per cent of ASX-listed Oil Search via a share placement.
“They never produced a human witness despite many opportunities and offers to do so, and secondly they say they produced all documents – we don’t know if that is so, because we didn’t have anyone we could examine about that.” But the counsel assisting is calling for UBS to be sanctioned for an apparent half-hearted engagement with the commission.“One might have thought the report, which has received considerable publicity in Australia, would have stung UBS to attend and defend themselves and provide witnesses, but they didn’t,” Dr Renwick told the commission.