Tommy Suharto loves motor racing. But if he turns up at the Grand Prix, Melbourne will meet more than a racing personality. At 33 years of age Tommy, or more correctly Hutomo Mandala Putra, belongs to Indonesia's wealthiest elite. He owns his own 4 km, $50 million international circuit outside Jakarta.
Tommy's fabulous success has long interested Indonesia's press. Less for his wealth, however, than for the way he acquires it. As President Suharto's youngest son, he and his equally prosperous siblings represent for many Indonesians the essential unfairness of a business system run by the few for the few. Not business acumen, but personal connections are the key ingredient. Such nepotism in Indonesia's dynamic economy is generating increasing resentment, especially as President Suharto grows older.
The Timor
Last week, share prices in Jakarta's motor industry plummeted when the President issued an Instruction granting Tommy's company Humpuss, and only Humpuss, tax exemption for a Korean car it wants to assemble. Without import duty and luxury sales tax, the Kia Sephia sedan will sell at half the price of its competitors. One government condition for obtaining the cut was that the car must have an Indonesian name. For some reason, Tommy chose to call it the 'Timor'. The Jakarta Post, a mainstream English language daily, said the instruction was 'a painful surprise', and 'extremely baffling'. It flew in the face of stated efforts to reduce monopolies.
Tommy Suharto's motoring interests go well beyond the Timor. He has a controlling interest in the Italian sports car Lamborghini. More controversially, he collects motor vehicle registration fees on behalf of the Jakarta government. In fact he has a range of privatized tax collection schemes in the making. One involves a computerized system to collect sales tax in restaurants and hotels, another a company to collect land and home ownership tax throughout Java. Many commentators think this blurring of the distinction between government and business is wide open to corruption.
Petrochemical to cloves
An astounding range of Tommy's new ventures have made business headlines over the last few years. He has a US$330 million methanol plant in East Kalimantan, and recently started work on a new US$850 million petrochemical plant in Aceh, Northern Sumatra. Humpuss runs several specialized liquid natural gas and petrochemical tankers.
He is presently extending the container terminal in Jakarta harbour at a cost of US$495 million, incidentally running into violent protests from evicted slum dwellers.
He owns several of the most expensive hotels and luxury tourist projects in Bali's vibrant tourist industry.
He heads a board that monopolizes the domestic trade in cloves, staple ingredient in Indonesia's national vice, the clove cigarette. His connections were able to force unwilling bankers to sink hundreds of millions of dollars of government money into the venture. Even so, it has never achieve the stated aim, to raise the price farmers get for their cloves.
Airline
Tommy owns part of Sempati Air, the first private company permitted to operate jets in Indonesia. Even the national airlines Garuda and Merpati look askance at Sempati for the privileged facilities it enjoys. With another businessman he has a leasing company, Arthasaka Nusaphala, that recently tried to force Merpati to lease locally built planes at such exorbitant rates that it triggered a revolt in the top ranks of the state- owned company.
Sempati Air will soon begin an international service to Burma, where Tommy already has timber interests through Rante Mario, a subsidiary of Humpuss. He heads up Indonesia House, a combined state and private initiative which will coordinate Indonesian trade and investment with the pariah regime in Burma.
Telecommunications
He competes furiously with companies run by his older brother Bambang Trihatmodjo and by his sister Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana (Tutut) for a slice of the action in new telecommunications projects reckoned in large fractions of a billion dollars. Some fear these telecommunications deals will later be resold to foreign investors at a profit. Others think the intention is to become so deeply enmeshed in infrastructure development that when father passes on no one can budge them.
Estimates of Tommy's personal wealth are vague. Humpuss, just over a decade old, has assets valued by some at US$1 billion. Last year the tax office rated Tommy ninth biggest personal tax payer in the country, this year sixteenth. He owns a 27 000 hectare hunting property in New Zealand, where guests pay NZ$700 a night.
Tommy Suharto is the face of Indonesia's economic success story - dynamic and monopolistic. The resentment the monopolistic practices cause within Indonesia may become so great that his father's departure may expose him to fierce retaliation.
Gerry van Klinken, editor, 'Inside
Indonesia' magazine.
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