Bangkok  - Myanmar's ruling junta is hiding billions of dollars in revenue from natural gas sales in two Singapore banks, a Washington-based human rights group claimed Thursday.

EarthRights International (ERI) said international pressure would not work against the military government as long as it has vast sums of easily available funds and the world community needs to put pressure on the banks in question.

ERI claims in a report released in Bangkok, "confidential and reliable" sources said Singapore's Overseas Chinese Development Banking Corporation (OCBC) and DBS Group are "offshore repositories of Yadana gas pipeline revenues."

Since commercial production started on the Yadana gas pipeline in 2000, Myanmar's government has earned about 4.83 billion dollars from sales of natural gas to Thailand, ERI said.

Through using an old exchange rate of 6 kyat to the dollar, instead of the current value for Myanmar's currency of nearly 1,000 kyat to the dollar, only 28 million dollars of that revenue made it into Myanmar's national budget. The remaining roughly 4.8 billion dollars has been deposited in accounts in the two Singapore banks, the 106-page report said.

The two banks in question have so far declined to comment. A DBS spokesman told the German Press Agency dpa internal checks were necessary before officially commenting.

The hidden revenue is one reason why international pressure on the Myanmar junta regarding human rights violations has had little effect so far, ERI said.

"As long as the Burmese [Myanmar] regime has easy access to billions of dollars, it has little incentive to come to the table," ERI's Burma Project Coordinator Matthew Smith said at the press conference.

"The military elite are hiding billions of dollars of the people's revenue in Singapore while the country needlessly suffers under the lowest social spending in Asia," Smith said.

Smith said ERI was calling on the international community to apply pressure on banks that facilitate the "misappropriation of funds."(dpa)