Election 2022: Second miner slams Solomon Islands ‘corruption’

A second Australian mining company has accused Solomon Islands’ government of corruption and the Morrison government of failing to stand up for its legal rights.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare. Picture: AFP

A second Australian mining company has accused Solomon Islands’ government of corruption and the Morrison government of failing to stand up for its legal rights as Chinese rivals bribed their way into securing lucrative mining leases in the country.

Pacific Bauxite chairman Peter Lewis told The Australian the company was forced to abandon its prospecting licence on the country’s Santa Cruz Island in 2021, wasting about $8m before it “threw in the towel”.

“It is made known that if you pay the right people, you will get what you want,” Mr Lewis told The Australian.

“It is all about money. But we’re a public company. There’s no way in the world we could do anything like that. We wouldn’t want to. The culture has now permeated the whole country.”

His comments come amid similar complaints by Australian nickel miner Axiom Mining, reported by The Australian, and Labor claims that the Coalition should have prevented Solomon Islands’ new security agreement with China.

Mr Lewis said Pacific Bauxite sought assistance without success from the Australian high commission in Honiara as it battled demands for bribes from Solomon Islands officials.

“When you met with people from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the Solomons, you’d just get this blank look. It was like ‘Oh, that’s a shame’. We’d say ‘Can you help?’ ‘Oh not really, it’s a sovereign country.’

“We’ve just been too bloody soft and the Chinese are as tough as nails, and totally bloody corrupt. They just go in and buy everybody off.”

Mr Lewis said the company’s Chinese rival Bintan – which was responsible for a devastating February 2019 oil spill cleaned up at Australian taxpayers’ expense – were “like a monster up there”.

“They’re mysterious characters. They never respond to any communication. They just work the system,” he said.

Mr Lewis said Pacific Bauxite wasted $200,000 in legal fees trying to fight for its rights before walking away from its Nendo bauxite tenement, which he described as a “world-class deposit”.

He said the nation’s courts had been co-opted and “if not corrupt, they’re certainly intimidated … You have a hearing. You’ve spent a fortune getting there and all of a sudden he’s sick, or on sabbatical or his son is in hospital. Then you wait for another two months, and there is another excuse.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said the Australian government was “committed to advancing the interests of Australian businesses overseas”.

“We have consistently urged the Solomon Islands government to process all mining applications transparently, in a timely manner and according to its own laws,” it said.

“The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force is responsible for investigating claims of corruption in Solomon Islands. Australian Government officials have consistently encouraged Australian businesses to provide any evidence of corruption to the RSIPF.”

Axiom Mining chief executive Ryan Mount told The Australian this week he warned the Morrison government three years ago that Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare was trying to hand a mining lease to Bintan, offering Beijing access to a strategic deepwater port 1700km from Cairns.

He said he was sidelined when he told Australian ­officials the Sogavare government had demanded bribes.