Papua New Guinea's Prime Minister Peter O'Neill has rejected as "utter nonsense" a report — he later admitted he hadn't read — that claims his country would have been better off without a massive liquefied natural gas project.
The report released by the Jubilee Australia Research Centre on Monday said the ExxonMobil-led PNG LNG project had not delivered the massive economic benefits that had been predicted.
It also claimed the PNG economy would have been better off if the project, PNG's biggest resource venture, had never been constructed.
During a speech to the Australia PNG Business Forum and Trade Expo in Brisbane Mr O'Neill dismissed the report as "fake news".
"Now those kinds of assessments are just utter nonsense," he said.
"It's quite disappointing to note that some of our experts who align themselves to political groupings continue to try and talk down the economy and continue to release fake news."
After his speech, Mr O'Neill said he had not read the Jubilee Australia report.
He acknowledged the PNG LNG project had not delivered the massive benefits that had been predicted, such as doubling the size of PNG's economy.
But he said that was the result of a drop in the price of oil.
"The flow-on effects of that is that none of the stakeholders will get the benefits that we were all anticipating," he said.
One of the co-authors of the Jubilee Australia report, economist Paul Flanagan, was in the audience during Mr O'Neill's speech and described it as "disappointing".
He said he stood by the report and its conclusions.
"That report indicated that on almost all economic criteria, welfare has decreased in PNG because of the PNG LNG project," he said.
"We stand by the point that at this stage, because of poor policies, PNG would've been better off without the PNG LNG project."
