The government of Nauru has rejected claims that a company garnered excessive benefits from cheap phosphate shipments from the island.
The chairman of the Australian Senate's Select Committee on Fertiliser Prices, Bill Heffernan, claimed that Nauru had been financially disadvantaged in the contractural arrangement with Australian-based Incitec-Pivot.
But Nauru's Minister for Commerce and Industry, Frederick Pitcher, says suggestions in the Heffernan Report that Incitec-Pivot paid well below world price for Nauru phosphate are ill informed and baseless.
He says in 2005 the two parties entered into a partnership in which the company was guaranteed a limited amount of phosphate in return for investing more than five million US dollars in upgrading Nauru's phosphate operation.
Mr Pitcher says at that time his government was faced with the daunting situation of either resuming its phosphate operation, or sinking further into economic difficulty.
He says the arrangement with Incitec-Pivot was a mutually beneficial arrangement and shortly thereafter, the prices increased substantially, which flowed on to Nauru's selling price.
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