Maseratis are missing, PNG officials confess

In an impoverished country of rough roads and rusting cars, a fleet of shiny new £132,000 (NZ$253,000) Bentley Flying Spurs and £95,000 (NZ$181,000) Maserati Quattroportes should be difficult to misplace.

Yet many of the luxury vehicles bought to ferry AsiaPacific leaders around a summit in Papua New Guinea in November have vanished, despite a government promise that the cars would quickly be sold and coffers replenished.

The purchase of 40 Maserati saloons and three Bentleys outraged opposition MPs and community leaders in a nation where 40 per cent of its eight million people live on less than NZ$2 a day. New Toyota Land Cruisers, ambulances and fire engines donated by Japan and China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (Apec) gathering of regional leaders in Port Moresby, the capital, are also missing.

‘‘There are fire engines, buses, ambulances unaccounted for. You name it,’’ Ken Ngangan, the finance secretary, has said. The government is pleading for the return of missing vehicles – some of which, according to local journalists, may have already been spirited out to Australia, where there is a ready market.

Emmanuel Narokobi, a journalist in Port Moresby who incurred the wrath of security forces when he first reported the secretive arrival of the Maseratis in October, told ‘‘It’s common knowledge everywhere that there are vehicles being driven around. There is a whole family in a fire truck, that sort of thing.

‘‘Immediately after Apec there were a couple of pictures of one or two Maseratis at people’s homes and down at the betel nut market. The main vehicles missing are the Toyota 4x4s, the ones that people can take out of the city.’’

The government claimed that it had local buyers lined up for the vehicles but Narokobi doubted this. ‘‘Nobody could afford one.’’ –