This is forty Maseratis being unloaded at an airport.

Not rented, not leased. Bought. Brand new.

Imported from Italy to a country where 40% of its population lives below the poverty line, and cannot afford their government spending around $8 million on luxury cars for a single event.

In 2018, Papua New Guinea was the host of the APEC Summit. The APEC Summit is a big series of meetings where countries in the Asia-Pacific region get together to talk about improving trade and business relations in their regions.

A limousine carrying China’s President Xi Jinping drives past dancers in traditional attire. Port Moresby, November 16, 2018.

Since PNG was hosting, our government decided to go all out, and employ one of their usual tactics – corruption.

They bought forty Maseratis and three Bentleys to be used to transport the top players in the meeting. How wildly unneccessary, couldn’t they just rent or lease all the cars?

They also bought three hundred other cars – cheaper brands – to be used during the summit. Soon after it was over, most of these cars went missing somehow.

Police were able to track them down and retrieve almost all of them, but some were already damaged, others came back with parts missing.

When citizens complained about the Maseratis and Bentleys, the government reassured us that they would resell them to make back the taxpayer’s money that they spent on it. They managed to resell only three cars in total, and one Bentley was “given” to the Prime Minister. The rest still sit in a warehouse last I heard.

How were they even going to sell them off? To who? Can’t imagine there’s a long line of people within the country able to afford Maseratis, used or otherwise, and if we’re talking about selling to overseas, many other countries have import restrictions on used cars.

As for the three hundred various assortment of cheaper cars, they were given to government officials, to “only be used for government duties.” Right.

PNG has high crime rates, some of the worst quality of healthcare in the world. Our government spent a total of $135 million on the summit, and I don’t know how they managed to get that kind of money especially as the summit happened while we were struggling to recover from a devastating earthquake, our usual nationwide medication shortage, and a polio outbreak on top of that.

I don’t know how much these huge summits usually cost to host, granted, but I’m sure without buying luxury cars from Italy it would have cost us a lot less.

Footnotes