Mineral Resources Development Company reported a PGK 22.1 million parent-level loss for 2024, a figure the state-owned trustee company disclosed alongside PGK 14.5 billion in assets under management, according to a statement MRDC published on its own website on July 17, 2026, responding to what it called misleading public commentary. The gap between those two numbers, a management company losing money while sitting on wealth larger than several PNG super funds combined, is now the fault line in a public argument over how Papua New Guinea’s biggest landowner trustee spends what it collects.
MRDC’s account, laid out in a statement titled “Setting the Records Straight,” is detailed and specific. It names the size of the loss, breaks down its two components, discloses the personnel cost figure driving criticism, and states a ratio it wants read as vindication. What it does not do, and what nobody outside MRDC has yet done, is publish the underlying entity-by-entity audit register, a personnel cost breakdown by role and seniority, or a comparative cost study against the funds it is implicitly measuring itself alongside. That gap between what MRDC asserts and what is independently checkable is the story.
THE LOSS, BROKEN DOWN
MRDC says the PGK 22.1 million loss sits at the parent company level only, excluding its 22 managed subsidiaries. Two components make up the total, according to the company’s own account. PGK 8.6 million, 39 percent of the loss, is a non-cash investment impairment, a valuation adjustment on holdings that MRDC attributes to market and commodity movements rather than any operational failure. The remaining PGK 13.5 million, MRDC says, reflects extraordinary audit and compliance costs that the company chose to absorb centrally in 2024 rather than pass down to the landowner companies it manages.
The scale of that audit push is the centerpiece of MRDC’s defense. The company says it completed 106 audits within a single 12-month period, covering MRDC itself and all 22 managed entities, using what it describes as top-tier accounting firms. MRDC frames the decision not to charge those costs to landowner companies as fiduciary restraint: “MRDC chose to absorb extraordinary audit costs rather than pass them to landowner companies. This is not financial weakness, it is fiduciary responsibility in action,” the statement reads.
The payoff MRDC points to is an unqualified audit opinion for 2024, the fifth consecutive clean opinion covering the 2020 to 2024 period. The company also says its 2025 accounts have already been completed, again unqualified, and are due to be presented to the shareholder, the PNG state.
None of that is independently verifiable from outside MRDC at this stage. The 106-audit figure is MRDC’s own count, not a published register. There is no public list identifying which of the 22 entities were audited for which years, which firms did the work, or what each engagement cost. Big Four involvement has been referenced in MRDC’s communications before, including in a 2024 address by managing director Augustine Mano confirming unqualified opinions across MRDC’s subsidiaries up to 2023. But a management assertion of “106 audits” and a published audit schedule are different things, and only one of them lets a reader test the claim.
THE PAYROLL NUMBER
MRDC’s personnel costs, including superannuation and all employee benefits, totaled PGK 29.3 million in 2024, the company confirms. That figure has become the second flashpoint, and MRDC’s response leans on a ratio: PGK 29.3 million against PGK 14.5 billion in assets under management works out to 0.2 percent, a number the company calls low by any regional or domestic investment management standard.
The arithmetic is correct as far as it goes. Whether the ratio is the right one to judge MRDC by is a separate question. MRDC itself concedes as much, noting in the same statement that its cost ratio “looks high” against revenue rather than against assets, because the company deliberately charges landowner companies management fees “below market rates based on each entity’s ability to pay.” That is an admission that the more common industry benchmark, personnel cost against revenue rather than against the asset base a company merely administers on behalf of others, would tell a less flattering story. MRDC says its remuneration is regularly benchmarked by Hays and People Connections, two established PNG recruitment and HR consultancies, though it has not published those benchmarking reports.
There is a structural reason the AUM-based ratio is generous to MRDC. Assets under management is the total value of what MRDC administers on behalf of landowners, not revenue MRDC itself earns or controls. A fund manager quoting fees as a fraction of AUM is standard industry practice globally, and MRDC’s 0.2 percent compares reasonably with typical institutional asset management fees. But MRDC is not simply a passive investment manager charging a fee on a pool of capital; by its own account, it prepares audited accounts for 22 entities, runs quarterly board meetings and compliance for each, manages tax and statutory reporting across the portfolio, and administers benefit distribution to thousands of landowners. That is a materially more labor-intensive mandate than benchmarking against a typical AUM-based fee ratio would suggest, and it cuts in MRDC’s favor rather than against it. Whether PGK 29.3 million is proportionate to that specific workload, as opposed to proportionate to the asset base, is exactly the comparison the public record does not yet allow.
WHAT THE SUPER FUNDS ACTUALLY DISCLOSE
Papua New Guinea’s major superannuation funds offer the closest available comparator, and their 2024 results are fully public, audited, and disclosed with far more granularity than MRDC’s. Nasfund reported a net asset value of PGK 8.1 billion and a net profit after tax of PGK 849 million for 2024, translating into an 11.75 percent interest crediting rate for its more than 715,000 members, according to the fund’s audited results approved by its trustee board in March 2025. Nambawan Super reported a net asset value of PGK 11.2 billion and a net profit after tax of PGK 1.1 billion for the same year, a 10.5 percent crediting rate for its 235,888 members, per the fund’s own March 2025 announcement.
Set MRDC’s PGK 14.5 billion in assets under management beside those figures and it is larger than either fund’s asset base. Set MRDC’s PGK 22.1 million loss beside Nasfund’s PGK 849 million profit and Nambawan Super’s PGK 1.1 billion profit and the optics MRDC is fighting become obvious, even accounting for the fact that these are not the same kind of institution.
That last caveat matters and should not be glossed over. Nasfund and Nambawan Super are member-owned superannuation funds pooling worker contributions for retirement; profit and crediting rate are the entire point of their existence, and they exist to grow member balances. MRDC is a trustee company managing landowner equity interests in resource and commercial projects on behalf of beneficiaries who did not choose to be members and cannot withdraw their stake; profit at the parent level is not really the metric that matters to MRDC’s mandate the way it matters to a super fund. Comparing MRDC’s loss to Nasfund’s profit as though they were playing the same game is, on its own, a weak argument. What the comparison usefully exposes instead is a disclosure gap. Nasfund and Nambawan Super publish granular annual reports with clear crediting rates, member statements, and year-on-year trend data that any member can check against their own account. MRDC’s beneficiaries, who are landowners and provincial governments rather than voluntary depositors, do not have an equivalent standardized annual disclosure to check their entitlement against. Neither Nasfund nor Nambawan Super publishes a personnel-cost-to-AUM ratio in the material available publicly, so even MRDC’s own headline number cannot be benchmarked like-for-like against the comparator it invites. That is a data gap on both sides of the comparison, not just MRDC’s.
THE GOVERNANCE QUESTION MRDC’S OWN STATEMENT CONCEDES EXISTS
MRDC’s statement opens by acknowledging that its 2024 results “have been the subject of public commentary” and states the company is responding “directly, with facts and with context, to some misleading comments.” That sentence confirms public criticism existed and was significant enough to warrant a formal company response. Commentary attributed to East Sepik Governor and opposition figure Allan Bird circulated on social media around the time of the tabling, according to material reviewed for this piece, raising the loss against the asset base, questioning personnel and overhead costs, and pointing to a lack of ESG and beneficiary-facing reporting. Exepreneur was not able to independently verify the exact wording of that commentary against a primary posting at time of publication, and readers should treat the specific framing attributed to Bird with that caveat. What is verifiable is that MRDC itself, in its own words, felt compelled to rebut public criticism along broadly those lines.
The deeper governance question predates this specific dispute. MRDC has faced sustained criticism over the years about the gap between the scale of resource wealth it administers and what reaches landowners directly. Landowner groups and PNG-focused investigative outlets have previously raised concerns about delayed royalty and equity distributions, opaque trust account management, and unclear decision pathways for MRDC-directed investments, including a widely reported K22 million landowner investment in a failed Port Moresby casino and hotel project years earlier, a loss that predates the 2024 accounts but sits in the same institutional memory landowners bring to any new MRDC number. MRDC has continued distributing benefits at scale since; the company confirmed in November 2025 that it had disbursed PGK 74.1 million in royalty and equity payments to PNG LNG Plant Site landowners in Central Province, covering entitlements dating back to 2018 and 2022 respectively. That is real progress on distribution, and it complicates any narrative that treats MRDC purely as an opaque cost center. But a track record of eventual payment does not answer the ESG and beneficiary transparency question landowner critics keep raising: whether beneficiaries can see, in something close to real time, what MRDC is doing with their equity and why.
MRDC’s own account of what it delivers beyond audits is substantial. The company says its subsidiaries spent PGK 45 million on Community Infrastructure Trust programs between 2022 and 2024, building schools, aid posts and community facilities, and that its scholarship programs sent more than 8,400 students to tertiary and technical institutions over the same period at a cost of nearly PGK 50 million. MRDC has also continued visible institutional investment in 2026, appointing Valentina Kaman as its first female chief risk officer, part of what the company describes as a strengthened executive team, and putting a new ATR aircraft into service for subsidiary Petroleum Resources Kutubu on the Moro route. None of that is disputed and none of it appears to be contested by MRDC’s critics. It is context that belongs in a full account of the institution, even if it does not resolve the specific question of whether a PGK 22.1 million parent-level loss and a PGK 29.3 million payroll are proportionate to the mandate.
THE OVERSIGHT QUESTION NO ONE HAS ANSWERED YET
Politically, this sits inside two ongoing dynamics. Prime Minister James Marape has tabled MRDC’s audited accounts in Parliament for several consecutive years, each time framing clean audit opinions as evidence of institutional maturity; he did the same with the 2018 and 2019 accounts, the 2022 portfolio figures that put MRDC at K7 billion, and now the 2024 results. That pattern gives Marape a personal stake in MRDC’s credibility separate from MRDC’s own. Opposition figures, meanwhile, have used MRDC as a recurring proof point in a broader argument that PNG’s state-linked entities report technical compliance without delivering measurable improvement in citizens’ lives, a theme Bird has pressed in Parliament on subjects well beyond MRDC.
Whether that political pressure converts into formal scrutiny is an open question Exepreneur could not resolve through public search. There is no confirmed public record of the Public Accounts Committee or the Ombudsman Commission opening a specific inquiry into the 2024 result. Given MRDC’s scale and its quasi-public trustee role over resource wealth equivalent to more than a tenth of PNG’s GDP by some historical company estimates, the absence of a standing, independent performance review mechanism, one that goes beyond a financial statement audit to test whether beneficiary outcomes match asset growth, remains the structural gap in PNG’s oversight of landowner wealth management. A clean audit opinion tests whether the numbers in the accounts are accurate. It does not test whether K14.5 billion in landowner wealth is being deployed as well as it could be, or whether K29.3 million in payroll buys the value MRDC says it does.
WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY SETTLE THIS
Three disclosures would move this from a dispute over framing to a dispute settled by evidence. First, the audit schedule: which of the 106 audits covered which entity and which year, conducted by which firm, at what cost, and whether any management letter flagged control weaknesses even where the headline opinion was unqualified. MRDC has the information; it has not published it. Second, a personnel cost breakdown by function and seniority, rather than a single aggregate figure, would let landowners judge whether PGK 29.3 million buys appropriately senior capability across MRDC’s genuinely wide mandate or an overweighted executive layer. Third, a standardized annual beneficiary report, along the lines of what Nasfund and Nambawan Super already produce for their members, covering distributions, investment performance by subsidiary, and cost ratios in a form landowners without institutional finance training can actually check.
MRDC’s central defense, that a management company handling a multi-sector, multi-jurisdiction landowner trust cannot fairly be benchmarked like a single-industry business, holds up reasonably well on its own terms. Its second defense, that PGK 29.3 million measured against a PGK 14.5 billion asset base is a low ratio by fund management standards, is arithmetically true and a genuinely reasonable point, though it is also the more flattering of two ratios MRDC could have led with. The unresolved question is not whether MRDC is lying. It is whether “trust us, we’re benchmarked” is an adequate substitute for the kind of granular, member-facing disclosure that PNG’s superannuation sector already treats as standard. Nasfund and Nambawan Super publish crediting rates every March that hundreds of thousands of ordinary contributors can check against their own balances. MRDC’s 22 managed companies and the landowners behind them still cannot do the equivalent, five consecutive unqualified audit opinions notwithstanding.
THE PRECEDENT PROBLEM
MRDC’s request that the public treat 2024 as an exceptional, one-off catch-up year runs into a specific credibility problem: PNG has heard some version of this story before. Prime Minister Marape told Parliament in 2023 that MRDC had achieved its first fully clean audit opinion in 47 years, tabling accounts that put the company’s portfolio at K7 billion. A year later, MRDC managing director Augustine Mano told an investment conference that all 21 subsidiary companies had been brought current through 2023, again a milestone framed as a one-time compliance breakthrough. Each of these announcements described the same underlying achievement, getting the books current, as a discrete, headline-worthy event. If 2024’s 106 audits genuinely represent the final catch-up after those earlier partial catch-ups, MRDC’s 2025 and 2026 accounts should show materially lower audit and compliance costs by comparison, since the backlog the company says drove the 2024 loss should not recur. That is a testable prediction. MRDC has already said its 2025 accounts are complete and unqualified; whether the extraordinary cost line shrinks accordingly, once those accounts are tabled and their cost detail made available, is the number that will show whether 2024 was genuinely exceptional or simply the year the criticism became loud enough to require a public answer.
There is also a currency and fiscal backdrop worth naming, even briefly. MRDC’s non-cash impairment component, PGK 8.6 million of the loss, is explicitly tied to what the company calls market and commodity price movements. PNG’s kina has faced sustained pressure over the review period, and the country’s broader FX and monetary environment, including the foreign exchange constraints the Bank of Papua New Guinea has managed and the fiscal strain flagged in successive national budgets, has affected the valuation of investment portfolios across PNG’s institutional investors, not MRDC alone. Nasfund’s own 2024 results disclosed a K5.7 million foreign exchange loss on its offshore portfolio that year, reversing to a K142 million FX gain in 2025 as offshore FX availability improved. That MRDC and Nasfund both booked FX-related valuation drag in the same year is a data point in MRDC’s favor: it suggests at least part of the 2024 loss reflects a sector-wide currency and market environment rather than an MRDC-specific failure. It does not, however, explain the personnel cost debate, which is a governance and disclosure question independent of currency movements.
WHERE THIS LEAVES LANDOWNERS
None of the above amounts to evidence that MRDC has done anything improper with the K22.1 million loss or the K29.3 million payroll. On the facts MRDC itself has disclosed, both numbers have a plausible, defensible explanation. The problem is that “plausible, defensible explanation from the party being questioned” is not the same evidentiary standard PNG’s superannuation sector already operates under, where crediting rates, cost ratios and portfolio performance are published annually as a matter of routine rather than produced defensively after criticism goes public. Landowners whose equity sits inside MRDC’s 22 managed companies do not get a March announcement with a headline crediting rate the way a Nasfund or Nambawan Super member does. They get a rebuttal statement when the criticism gets loud enough.
A trustee that manages more wealth than the country’s two largest super funds combined should not need a rebuttal statement to explain a K22 million line item. It should be publishing the kind of report that makes the rebuttal unnecessary.
