28 Feb 2012

Polye loses PNG finance portfolio

6:23 pm on 28 February 2012

Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Peter O'Neill has taken on the finance portfolio after stripping it from his treasurer, Don Polye.

However, Mr Polye will retain his treasury portfolio.

Mr O'Neill took the action after alleging in a letter that Mr Polye failed to contain expenditure overruns.

Mr Polye, who was briefly the deputy prime minister in 2010, late last year presented PNG's largest ever budget of five billion US dollars.

Angry landowners impacted by PNG's massive LNG project have twice in the past two weeks staged protests outside government offices in Port Moresby.