Salam!
Atas permintaan seorang rekan lewat JAPRI, di sini saya kirimkan sebagian
laporan khusus TIME soal KKN Soeharto dan Keluarga. Makasih.
salam,
ramadhan pohan
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The Family Firm
A TIME investigation into the wealth of Indonesia's Suharto and his children
uncovers a $15 billion fortune in cash, property, art, jewelry and jets
By JOHN COLMEY and DAVID LIEBHOLD Jakarta
When the end came for Suharto, Indonesia's long-serving President appeared
oddly passive. As students and angry mobs took to the streets and soldiers
responded with gunfire and tear gas, the five-star general hovered in the
background, making few attempts to set things right. When he finally quit a
year ago this week, he stood meekly to the side as his successor, B.J.
Habibie, took the oath of office. Suharto has hardly been heard from since.
But Indonesia's onetime autocrat has been far busier than most of his
countrymen realize. Just after his fall from power there began feverish
movements of his personal fortune. In July 1998, reports emerged that a
staggering sum of money linked to Indonesia had been shifted from a bank in
Switzerland to another in Austria, now considered a safer haven for hush-hush
deposits. The transfer caught the attention of the United States Treasury,
which tracks such movements, and set in motion diplomatic inquiries in
Vienna. Now, as part of a four-month investigation that covered 11 countries,
TIME has learned that $9 billion of Suharto money was transferred from
Switzerland to a nominee bank account in Austria. Not bad for a man whose
presidential salary was $1,764 a month when he left office. (Suharto, for his
part, denies that he has any bank deposits abroad and insists that his wealth
amounts to a mere 19 hectares of land in Indonesia, plus $2.4 million in
savings.)
Those billions are just part of the Suharto wealth. Though the Asian
financial crisis has trimmed the family empire considerably, the former
President and his children retain a staggering fortune. It was built over
three decades from a skein of companies, monopolies and control over vast
sectors of economic activity in Indonesia--from oil exports to humble
pilgrims making the yearly visit to Mecca. (They flew on planes leased from
companies controlled by Suharto's children.) According to data from the
National Land Agency and Properti Indonesia magazine, the Suharto family on
its own or through corporate entities controls some 3.6 million hectares of
real estate in Indonesia, an area larger than Belgium. That includes 100,000
sq m of prime office space in Jakarta and nearly 40% of the entire province
of East Timor.
Within Indonesia, the six Suharto offspring have significant equity in at
least 564 companies, and their overseas interests include hundreds of other
firms, scattered from the U.S. to Uzbekistan, the Netherlands, Nigeria and
Vanuatu. The Suhartos also possess plenty of the trappings of wealth. In
addition to a $4 million hunting ranch in New Zealand and a half-share in a
$4 million yacht moored outside Darwin, Australia, youngest son Hutomo
Mandala Putra (nicknamed Tommy) owns a 75% stake in an 18-hole golf course
with 22 luxury apartments in Ascot, England. Bambang Trihatmodjo, Suharto's
second son, has an $8 million penthouse in Singapore and a $12 million
mansion in an exclusive neighborhood of Los Angeles, two doors down from rock
star Rod Stewart and just up the street from his brother Sigit Harjoyudanto's
$9 million home. Eldest daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana may have sold her
Boeing 747-200 jumbo jet, but the family's fleet of planes included, at least
until recently, a DC-10, a blue-and-red Boeing 737, a Canadian Challenger 601
and a BAC-111. The latter once belonged to the Royal Squadron of Britain's
Queen Elizabeth II, according to Dudi Sudibyo, managing editor of Indonesia's
Angkasa aerospace magazine.
Neither Suharto nor his six children responded to requests for interviews,
though lawyers for the former President and son Bambang asserted that their
clients did nothing illegal. Indeed, no one has proven that the Suhartos
broke any laws. Their companies mostly consist of operating entities that
turn profits, create jobs and import Western technology. Yet allegations that
the former First Family benefited from favoritism, commonly heard in
Indonesia since the early 1980s, began to grow louder when the former
President resigned. His successor quickly announced an official investigation
into such charges. Tommy, the youngest son whose corporate empire at one
point included the Lamborghini sports car company, is already in legal
jeopardy, facing charges of defrauding a state agency of $11 million in a
real estate deal. The South Jakarta district court recently rejected a plea
from Tommy's lawyers that he be tried in a civil court and is proceeding with
a criminal trial.
In an interview at the State Palace, Habibie told TIME he will not cover up
for his former mentor, but he has so far declined to freeze the family's
holdings or to follow up on the investigation in any meaningful way. Private
asset-tracing firms are excited at the prospect of a Suharto treasure hunt,
if only Jakarta would hire them. "In terms of dollars, we think this could be
bigger than anything we have ever seen before," says Stephen Vickers, Asia
chief for Kroll Associates, which helped investigate the wealth of the
Philippines' former President Ferdinand Marcos. "My bags are packed."
The search won't start in earnest unless the man in charge of the
government's investigation, Attorney General Andi Muhammad Ghalib, gives the
go-ahead. Ghalib, a three-star general in the Indonesian military, told TIME
that he has found no evidence that his former supreme commander wrongly
acquired state assets. But Ghalib has been moving slowly, and some of his own
staff members are not convinced the investigation is serious. In the opinion
of an official in the Attorney General's office, "Ghalib is on a mission to
protect Suharto."
Nonetheless, the code of secrecy shielding the family is breaking down. After
hundreds of interviews with former and current Suharto friends and government
officials, business associates, lawyers, accountants, bankers and relatives,
as well as examinations of dozens of documents (including bank records of
outstanding loans), TIME correspondents found indications that at least $73
billion passed through the family's hands between 1966 and last year. Much of
that was from the mining, timber, commodities and petroleum industries. Bad
investments and Indonesia's financial crisis have reduced the sum
substantially. But evidence indicates that Suharto and his six children still
have a conservatively estimated $15 billion in cash, shares, corporate
assets, real estate, jewelry and fine art--including works by Indonesian
masters Affandi and Basoeki Abdullah in the collection of Siti Hediati
Hariyadi, the middle daughter known as "Titiek."
Suharto laid the foundation for the family fortune by establishing the
intricate nationwide system of patronage that kept him in power for 32 years.
His children, in turn, parlayed their ties to the President into the role of
middlemen for government purchases and sales of oil products, plastics, arms,
airplane parts and petrochemicals. They held monopolies on the distribution
and import of major commodities. They obtained low-interest loans by
colluding with or even strong-arming bankers, who were often afraid to ask
for repayment. Subarjo Joyosumarto, managing director of Bank Indonesia, the
central bank, confirms that during the time of Suharto, "there was an
environment that made it difficult for the state banks to refuse them."
While the Indonesian economy was growing fast, it was possible to make light
of the Suhartos' rent-seeking ways. Now, with half the population below the
poverty line as a result of the financial crash, there is little doubt that
the family grew wealthy at the expense of the nation. A former business
associate of the children estimates that they skipped tax payments of between
$2.5 billion and $10 billion on commissions alone. "It is very likely that
none of the Suharto companies has ever paid more than 10% of its real tax
obligations," says Teten Masduki, an executive member of Indonesian
Corruption Watch, an anti-graft non-governmental organization. "Can you
imagine how much revenue has been forgone?"
Many Indonesians also blame Suharto for creating a climate of corruption that
pervaded the entire economy. The World Bank estimates that as much as 30% of
Indonesia's development budget over two decades disappeared through
civil-service-wide corruption that filtered down from the top. "If you don't
pay bribes, people think you're odd," says Edwin Soeryadjaya, a director of
an Indonesian-U.S. telecommunications joint venture. "It's very sad. I cannot
say that I'm proud to be an Indonesian. This is one of the most corrupt
countries in the world."
The Suharto reach extended well beyond the foundations' interests, and few
deals were more lucrative than the family's oil businesses. In his first
decade in power, Suharto allowed state oil conglomerate Pertamina to be run
as a private fief by its founder Ibnu Sutowo, a former general once known as
the second most powerful man in Indonesia. Sutowo's plan to build a huge
tanker fleet for Pertamina brought it to the brink of financial collapse in
1975. He was fired the following year, though it wasn't clear whether the
cause was mismanagement or his political ambitions. Now 84, Sutowo tells TIME
it was neither. He says Suharto asked him in 1976 to set up a second trading
company to ship Indonesian crude oil to Japan. "He said to me, 'I want you to
take $0.10 for every barrel traded by the new company,'" Sutowo recalls.
"When I said no, I think he was shocked."
After Sutowo was fired, Pertamina eventually imported and exported much of
its oil through Perta Oil Marketing and Permindo Oil Trading, two small
companies in which Tommy and older brother Bambang acquired significant
stakes in the mid-1980s. According to a senior official in Habibie's
government, the firms received a commission of $0.30 to $0.35 a barrel. In
the 1997-98 fiscal year, the two companies handled an average of 500,000
barrels a day, for yearly commissions of more than $50 million. Says former
Mines and Energy Minister Subroto: "Pertamina could have exported directly.
There was no need for these companies."
In addition, a former business associate of Tommy and Bambang says there were
extra, unofficial markups on oil exports and imports that earned the firms as
much as $200 million a year in the 1980s, when prices were high, and about
half that in the 1990s. Suharto family companies received Pertamina's
contracts for insurance, security, food supplies and other services--a total
of 170 contracts in all. Last year, shortly after Suharto's fall, Pertamina
canceled many of them and announced instant savings of $99 million a year.
Says the former associate of the Suharto scions: "They milked Pertamina like
a cow."
One major Suharto money spinner was PT Nusantara Ampera Bakti, or Nusamba,
which was launched with $1.5 billion in 1981 by three of the foundations,
together with Bob Hasan and Suharto's eldest son Sigit (who held 10% each).
The firm became a sprawling conglomerate with more than 30 subsidiaries in
finance, energy, pulp and paper, metal and automobiles. Nusamba's jewel was a
4.7% share in Freeport Indonesia, an American-controlled company that runs
the world's largest gold mine in the province of Irian Jaya. In 1992 the
foundations apparently transferred their 80% share to Hasan, though it is not
clear how much he paid for it. So far, government investigators have not
asked to see Nusamba's books. Says Otto Cornelis Kaligis, head of Suharto's
eight-member legal team: "When you talk about Nusamba you have to ask Bob
Hasan. In the investigation of President Suharto, the Attorney General never
asked any questions about Nusamba."
The family profited not only by winning concessions from the government but
occasionally by disrupting the lives of individual Indonesians who stood in
the way. When Suharto wanted to build a cattle ranch getaway in West Java in
1973, he displaced the inhabitants of five villages spread over 751 hectares.
According to official records, he paid a total of $5,243 in compensation.
Some villagers say they got nothing. Muhammad Hasanuddin, who was a boy at
the time, remembers when his family's two-hectare rice farm was lost. "We saw
the fat cows, herded by dozens of men pompously riding on horseback,
trampling our ruined fields. The whole family could only cry." Hasanuddin's
father ended up as a pedicab driver in Jakarta.
Similar stories abound. In 1996, a company owned by Tommy forced villagers
off their land in Bali to build a 650-hectare resort. The firm had a permit
for only 130 hectares, which it illegally expanded, according to Sonny Qodri,
chairman of Bali's Legal Aid Institute. Residents who refused to sign an
agreement to sell their land were intimidated, beaten and sometimes put in a
pond up to their necks. Two were brought to court and jailed for six months.
Nothing remains of the project now: recession hit just as the bulldozers were
moving in.
Hasan Basri Durin, chairman of the National Land Agency and Minister of Land
Affairs, says the Suharto family typically paid peanuts for the property it
acquired--the average was 6% of market value--and reluctant sellers often
changed their minds after visits from thugs or soldiers. "Sometimes they
didn't pay one cent," says Hasan. "But it's legal because they [the Suhartos]
have the documents." Only about half of Indonesia's farmers hold a registered
title to their land, so proving ownership can be difficult--and proving
intimidation even harder. As a result, few have come forward to complain.
