Tag: sri mulyani

  • Kejanggalan Penanganan Lumpur Lapindo

    Kejanggalan Penanganan Lumpur Lapindo

    suarasurabaya.net – Mursid Mudiantoro, kuasa hukum korban Lapindo menduga ada permainan kebijakan di balik tak kunjung lunasnya ganti rugi bagi korban lumpur yang ada di dalam peta terdampak. Permainan ini, kata Mursid bisa diketahui dengan tidak dilaksanakannya surat Sri Mulyani, Menteri Keuangan bernomor S-358/MK.02/2009 tertanggal 16 Juni 2009.

    “Ada surat Sri Mulyani, yang ternyata berbeda dengan yang dilaksanakan BPLS,” kata Mursid ketika berbincang dengansuarasurabaya.net, Rabu (11/12/2013).

    Setelah surat dari Sri Mulyani yang ditujukan pada DPR RI dan BPLS itu, BPLS lantas mengirimkan surat terkait perubahan Peraturan Presiden (Perpres) tentang BPLS.

    Menurut Mursid, surat dari BPLS tertanggal 23 September 2009 ternyata berbeda dengan surat dari Sri Mulyani.

    Dalam surat Sri Mulyani, ditegaskan jika negara bisa memberikan dana talangan untuk pemberian ganti rugi bagi aset tanah dan rumah warga korban lumpur. Sedangkan untuk penanganan semburan yaitu membuat tanggul dan mengalirkan lumpur ke Sungai Porong harusnya ditanggung oleh Lapindo.

    “Tapi dalam suratnya, BPLS malah membalik dan minta penanganan pengaliran semburan lumpur diambil alih negara. Sedangkan pemberian ganti rugi tetap dibebankan pada Lapindo,” kata Mursid.

    Dengan adanya surat ini, presiden lantas mengeluarkan Perpres perubahan ke-tiga terkait BPLS, yaitu Perpres tahun 2009.

    Adanya kejanggalan ini, kata Mursid, juga telah dia ungkap dalam persidangan lanjutan uji materi terkait ganti rugi di Mahkamah Konstitusi (MK), pada Selasa (10/12/2013) kemarin.

    Bahkan dalam persidangan kemarin, surat dari Sri Mulyani dan dari BPLS ini juga telah diminta untuk dijadikan sebagai barang bukti tambahan.

    Mursid berharap, dengan adanya bukti tambahan ini, korban lumpur bisa memenangkan uji materi sehingga proses pemberian ganti rugi segera bisa diambil alih oleh pemerintah.

    Sekadar diketahui, saat ini korban Lapindo yang berada di dalam peta terdampak mengajukan uji materi terhadap Undang-undang nomor 15 tahun 2013 tentang perubahan atas Undang-undang nomor 19 tahun 2012 tentang APBN khususnya pasal 9 ayait 1 huruf a tentang anggaran ganti rugi untuk korban lumpur.

    Gugatan di MK ini dimaksudkan untuk meminta keadilan sehingga warga yang berada di dalam peta terdampak yaitu warga Siring, Renokenongo, Jatirejo, dan Kedunggbendo segera mendapatkan proses pelunasan ganti rugi dan diambilkan dari dana APBN bukan lagi dari Lapindo.

    Sidang lanjutan sendiri akan digelar pada 17 Desember 2013 mendatang dengan agenda kesimpulan. (fik/ipg)

    Sumber: http://kelanakota.suarasurabaya.net/news/2013/128133-Kejanggalan-Penanganan-Lumpur-Lapindo

  • Indonesia at the Crossroads (Sigh) Again

    Friday, 24 October 2008 – A defining struggle breaks out between a reformer and the king of the country’s old guard. In one direction beckons people like Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the country’s finance minister. Clean, capable, she’s the anti-politician Indonesians love and who foreign investors can’t stop talking about.

    In one direction beckons people like Sri Mulyani Indrawati, the country’s finance minister. Clean, capable, she’s the anti-politician Indonesians love and who foreign investors can’t stop talking about.

    Barely a month passes without Mulyani winning some sort of global gong; this month she’s Euromoney Magazine’s Finance Minister of the Year – for the second time. At 46, Mulyani symbolises the Indonesia that is possible, one that works properly, a competent resourceful Indonesia that wants to prosper away from the chronic corruption and cronyism that pollutes from the country’s grubby past.

    Gesturing the other way is the tendency represented by Aburizal Bakrie, Indonesia’s richest man (or at least he was until markets melted down). He sits with Mulyani in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s cabinet, somewhat perversely as the minister primarily responsible for Indonesia’s poor, the Co-Ordinating Minister for People’s Welfare. Garrulous, oleaginous and a virtual law unto himself, the 62 year-old Bakrie is a holdover from the Suharto era, when the extent of one’s fortune tended to be determined by one’s proximity to the kleptator.

    Bakrie is the patriarch of the resources-to-telecoms Bakrie Brothers group, Indonesia’s biggest corporate entity. He’s in the cabinet because he and his colleagues at Kadin, Indonesia’s crony-heavy chamber of commerce, helped SBY’s 2004 tilt at the presidency, along with South Sulawesi’s wealthy patron Jusuf Kalla and the backing of Suharto’s old fief, Golkar, now a Bakrie-Kalla domain. The vice-presidency was Kalla’s payoff while Bakrie became Minister for the Economy. Foxes and henhouses, warned horrified Indonesians at the time.

    A decade after the fall of Suharto, Mulyani speaks for the new Indonesia, where government business is transacted cleanly, transparently and democratically. She is regarded as fearless, overhauling two of the most corrupt and inefficient institutions in Indonesia; customs and the tax office. At the customs office, she removed 1,500 staff and replaced them with 800 new officers, paying them several times more while warning that if they took backhanders justice would be swift and harsh. Efficiency was improved but vested interests who liked getting their goods nodded through – for a ‘fine’ of course – were not pleased.

    Bakrie is old Indonesia, operating in the shadows. Now the two of them seem to be on a collision course. Jakarta has been agog with their gathering feud since the financial crisis from the US subprime meltdown started rippling through Indonesia. The Bakrie group has been a victim of the growing economic crisis. Most of the listed component companies have spent more time suspended from stock exchange trading than having their shares transacted. Last week, the Indonesian government allowed state-owned companies to buy into stricken Bakrie companies, which are facing share price-linked loan defaults. It looks suspiciously like a bailout, the third Bakrie will have enjoyed.

    Mulyani wasn’t pleased. “I am the Finance Minister, my job is to protect the state fund,” she reportedly told Kadin. “Companies have a job to protect their own financial affairs. If they fail, it is their fault and they deserve to go bust.”

     This week the feud broke out all over the Indonesian media. On Wednesday, the Jakarta Post led with the story “Efforts Seen to Unseat Sri Mulyani.”

    The rub was in the second paragraph; “Efforts to topple the ‘iron lady’ intensified after she turned down requests from a major conglomerate for government assistance in saving its business empire in the wake of the global financial meltdown, sources said.” Bakrie wasn’t named but no other “major conglomerate” has been requesting government assistance in recent times.

    On Thursday, the government was forced to deny that the cabinet was “cracking.” The paper also reported a Wednesday meeting at VP Kalla’s office on the crisis facing the Bakrie group. It was attended by Kalla, Mulyani, central bank governor Boediono and Aburizal Bakrie, who has long insisted that he has no day-to-day involvement in the business affairs of his family’s empire.

    The dilemma is a delicate one for SBY. The economy is fragile in the jittery global environment and he needs an internationally trusted figure like Mulyani to help salve foreign investors. A career technocrat, Mulyani has no domestic political muscle to speak of. With the election coming up next April, SBY needs Bakrie – or at least someone with his resources – but does not necessarily want him, for all that he represents.

    But Bakrie isn’t as rich as he used to be, and will be even poorer if his empire, the basis of his political power, fails. The Bakrie Group isn’t a Fannie Mae or AIG but a failure of such a big corporate entity could ripple into a wider Indonesian economy.

    There was also the matter of PT Lapindo Brantas, the Bakrie-owned gas company whose disastrous gas well blowout in East Java kicked off a mud volcano that so far has displaced 75,000 villagers from their homes and turned into the country’s biggest environmental disaster. Lapindo Brantas claims the rupture was caused by a distant earthquake fault. The government may have held its nose, but although Bakrie has so far paid out Rp4 trillion to the displaced villagers, Jakarta has assumed responsibility for cleaning up the disaster and the Environment Ministry even awarded Lapindo Brantas its “Oscar” for complying with safety and environmental standards.

    The gulf between Mulyani and Bakrie was evidenced when Suharto died in January. A stream of deathbed wellwishers made their way to the Suharto compound on Jalan Cendana to bid the old tyrant farewell. Aburizal Bakrie was prominent among them. Sri Mulyani wasn’t. The Bakrie family got rich in the Suharto era. Mulyani was an academic, and later represented Indonesia at the IMF, hardly the most popular multilateral agency in Indonesia after its handling of the mid-1990s financial crisis, when Suharto fell. Her own nationalism has been called into question because of her stint with the IMF.

    Bakrie’s feud with Mulyani comes as SBY pulls ahead in opinion polls from former President Megawati Sukarnoputri. But it also comes as Parliament debates how much electoral support presidential aspirants will need to allow their candidacy. Bakrie’s Golkar and Megawati’s PDI-P dominate Parliament. SBY’s Democrat Party does not. Golkar and PDI-P could push through whatever deal they concoct. But Golkar’s problem is that no one in its leadership ranks is very popular. And the Indonesian electorate seem to be wising up to Megawati, a gormless shopaholic who seems to think a famous family name is birthright enough for a second term.

    Where this all goes is hard to predict. A rising force is the Islamist Prosperous Justice Party, the Partai Keadilan Sejahtera, or PKS, which speaks for 10-15 percent of the population and is gathering more support on its mosque-based anti-corruption platform. The PKS is behind the recent anti-pornography bill, which has divided this secular nation. SBY has a sprinkle of religious parties represented in his Cabinet, and could draw closer to the PKS if Parliament makes odious rules on candidacy qualifications.

    On the road ahead is next April’s presidential election. SBY wants another five-year term, and so does Megawati, whose first stint in the Istana Merdeka from 2001-04 was hardly electric. Indonesia descended to near the bottom of Transparency International’s graft league table, while bomb-happy Islamists threatened to transform Indonesia into Afghanistan East.

    SBY won a landslide in 2004 campaigning to rid of both terrorism and corruption. The terror part he has largely succeeded with. Abu Bakr Bashir’s Jemaah Islamiah movement and its imitators have been largely neutralised, many of their adherents turned. Radical madrassas have been shut down or neutered, in what is the most telling success of the SBY era.

    Corruption has proved trickier to tame. True, Indonesia no longer languishes in the bottom five of the TI table but position 142 of the 190 countries ranked hardly makes Indonesia Scandinavian in its regard for public office. Still, it’s better than it was. Public officials from across the islands are now getting their collars felt.

    Jakarta’s newspapers daily titillate with tearful confessions and fascinating detail as to how deep-seated corruption is; parliamentarians for sale, and the central bank too. The fact that it is being publicly aired is evidence Indonesians crave to be normal, to want civil society. Whether Mulyani goes or stays will go a long way to letting them know if that is in the cards.

    (c) Asia Sentinel

  • Jakarta Post Editorial: The Burning Seat

    Finance Minister Sri Mulyani has been sitting in the hot seat for some time now, and now her seat has now gone from hot to burning since businesspeople and politicians with vested interests have been making attempts to unseat her. We earnestly hope she will survive this saga.

    The imbroglio, we suspect, is related to what has been going on in the financial market, especially to the Bakrie Group. Many believe Bakrie is now in a make-or-break situation as it struggles to meet huge obligations to its creditors who hold shares in its subsidiary companies as collateral.

    Now that the value of this collateral has dropped significantly, Bakrie is trying to sell off its assets to repay $1.2 billion worth of debts that will mature between the end of this year and early next year.

    As the situation worsens, the Bakrie Group, controlled by the family of Coordinating Minister for People’s Welfare Aburizal Bakrie, may make a desperate attempt to get President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to bail them out using either state money or funds from state companies.

    It seems that most cabinet ministers and even Vice President Jusuf Kalla have made no objections to such a move. But Finance Minister Sri Mulyani, who holds the key to the state coffers, differs and even resists a move that smacks of a raw deal.

    We are concerned whether Sri Mulyani will be able to maintain her strong stance in the face of mounting pressure from various quarters. Because of her persistent anti-graft reform drive at the ministry, she has established more enemies than anyone else in her position previously.

    Her reform of the customs office at Indonesia’s largest port, Tanjung Priok, has cost certain businesspeople dearly. Those who once took an easy route by bribing customs officials to get their goods out of the customs area quickly (often by smuggling or under-invoicing imports), now find it much tougher to slip through.

    Worse, several parties now claim that customs officials who were dissatisfied with Mulyani’s work have intentionally slowed their pace of work. This development has impacted honest businesspeople who must bear higher capital costs because of the slowed movement of their goods. So now both kinds of businesspeople have a reason to dislike her.

    Mulyani’s anti-graft reforms at the tax office have also taken their toll. One good example is the much-publicized zealous efforts of the tax office to uncover the suspected tax evasion of a palm oil company belonging to Raja Garuda Mas Group, controlled by powerful businessman Sukanto Tanoto.

    Mulyani has also engaged in confrontations with certain coal producers, asking the immigration office to impose travel bans on businesspeople with coal interests who owed the state unpaid royalties and taxes. One such coal company belongs to the Bakrie Group.

    But Mulyani had clashed with the Bakrie Group before this, when, through the Capital Market Supervisory Agency, she rejected a plan by Bakrie’s oil and gas entity, Energi Mega Persada, to spin-off Lapindo Brantas (which had created massive problems in Sidoarjo resulting from an uncontrolled mudflow that is believed to have resulted from Lapindo drilling activities there). This case was finally resolved, with Energi allowed to sell Lapindo to wash its hands of an uncertain future liability.

    And now, Mulyani is clashing with Bakrie again. This time, however the clash looks to be protracted, as Bakrie is in a do-or-die situation where it needs to attract buyers or get help from the state or it will face bankruptcy or hostile takeover. Mulyani has said if companies must go bust, then let them be. After all, it is their fault, and why should the government come to rescue them.

    Because of her persistence in protecting the state budget from abuse, Mulyani’s enemies have launched a covert operation to unseat her. In the public domain, concerted efforts have been made to discredit Mulyani — claiming she is “un-nationalistic” for her unwillingness to help out local indigenous businesspeople. Some of these people have even accused her of being a running dog for the International Monetary Fund, where she once served as an executive director.

    On the contrary, by acting firmly to clean up the customs and tax offices, by penalizing corrupt businesspeople and by acting firmly to defend the state budget from abuse, we can see Mulyani is in fact more nationalistic than those who have attempted to discredit her.

    The current political situation may present itself to President Yudhoyono as a big dilemma: whether to help his business friends, or to side with the impeccable and respected finance minister. But the choice is really clear.

    Thu, 10/23/2008 11:04 AM  |  Opinion | The Jakarta Post

    Sumber: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/23/editorial-the-burning-seat.html