Earlier this week, I remarked with some interest that Angola was gearing up to have their SWF up and running this year. I also noted that this brought the total number of new SWFs in (or around) 2009 to 10. Well, make it 11.
Papua New Guinea announced today that it is thinking about establishing an SWF so as to manage the revenues it is expecting from a large liquefied natural gas project. Apparently, the government is expecting something in the range of $50 billion. Rod Mitchell, Managing director of one of PNG’s biggest superannuation funds, had this to say:
“The benefits from a sovereign fund, particularly in PNG’s case is that we are going to have very large revenues coming into PNG over the next 30 years and we simply don’t have the capacity in country to actually absorb those revenues. “
Indeed, this SWF will be important for the country in avoiding Dutch Disease. Encouragingly, all the stakeholders seem to agree that good institutional governance is worth the investment. In fact, PNG ministers were reportedly in Australia last month, where they received a commitment of assistance in setting up the legislative framework that would underpin the new SWF.
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