‘Chinese corner SMEs’

Source:
The National - Friday, March 11, 2011
By PATRICK TALUA GOVERNMENT agency created to help indigenous small-to-medium size businesses has revealed that nationals account only for 10% of business activities reserved for them.The rest are in the hands of foreigners, mostly Chinese-owned.A senior officer with the business development service at the Small Business Development Corp (SBDC) revealed this during a small-to-medium entrepreneurs (SME) baseline survey workshop yesterday at March Girls Resort outside of Port Moresby.The officer, who wished to remain anonymous, told reporters almost all small-to-medium size businesses reserved for nationals have already been taken by foreigners.“Also this particular group of expatriate businessmen are using Papua New Guineans to register their business with the Investment Promotion Authority and to conduct business,” he said.“We also suspect that they don’t have bank accounts to deposit their takings from their business,” he added.When asked whether this implied that these foreigners were suspected of smuggling money out of PNG, he did not rule it out.But there were many instances where large amount of hard cash was discovered by customs officers at the airport.The officer said he did not have a record of such activities but as the custodian of SME, he knew what was happening in the small business sector.“You can see that almost all of the fast food marts are all run by Chinese … not to mention other businesses such as trye service and second-hand clothing.“That’s obvious enough to say that the SMEs have been taken over by Chinese,” he said