A Pacific island’s president bypassed an official selection process when he chose an Indian company to reopen a multi-billion-dollar mine. He told OCCRP the firm’s managing director offered to pay for his wife’s kidney transplant but insisted it had “nothing to do” with the deal.
Key findings
- Ishmael Toroama, the president of Papua New Guinea’s autonomous region of Bougainville, signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Lloyds Metals and Energy Ltd in November 2025, despite warnings from Bougainville’s majority government-owned mining company, Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL), that Lloyds lacked the technical and financial capacity of rival bidders.
- Toroama told OCCRP that in October 2025 — just before the MoU was signed — he accepted an offer from Lloyds’ managing director Balasubramanian Prabhakaran to arrange for his wife to travel to India and have a life-saving kidney operation at no cost to the president.
- Lloyds paid for the kidney transplant, according to an employee of the clinic where the operation took place. (Lloyds did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
- Toroama told OCCRP the undisclosed arrangement did not influence his decision to choose Lloyds.
- Lloyds did not appear to follow the normal bidding process: after it signed a nondisclosure agreement with BCL in April 2025 that granted it access to confidential information about Panguna, within days Lloyds stopped communicating with BCL and never sent an official expression of interest.
Almost 40 years after it descended into a devastating civil war, the autonomous region of Bougainville is on the cusp of achieving independence from Papua New Guinea. At its heart sits Panguna, a long-shuttered gold and copper mine worth an estimated $160 billion.
To relaunch the Panguna mine and generate the type of economic development that could support the impoverished region’s bid for full sovereignty, Bougainville’s majority state-owned mining company spent around 10 months on a public search for an international partner, speaking to some of the world’s largest and most experienced mining companies.
But last November, Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama made a shock announcement: he had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to redevelop the mine with Lloyds Metals and Energy Ltd, a publicly-traded Indian company with no background in major copper and gold extraction.
