We love IFs. If we can give free meal to 82 million people the economy will grow 8% per annum. If we can build three million homes per annum, we can achieve 8% growth in two years time. If we can build more food estates, we will not only self-sufficient in food supply but an exporter. IF we can fix Pertamina, the country can stop importing oil and gas.
When the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) announced Riza Chalid a corruption suspect, some, mostly from Prabowo’s supporters, rushed to make a conclusion: Pertamina will become a more profitable company, and, accordingly, can contribute to Prabowo’s target of US$50 billion profit from sovereign wealth fund Danantara—-which, according to the President, would cut the budget deficit to zero.
There was an external investigative audit during the early years of Jokowi administration found Riza collected US$14.2 billion from all of his oil transactions with Petral/Pertamina Energy Services (decades of transactions). Petral was disbanded, but Riza managed to continue doing business with Pertamina for another ten years since the report was commissioned.
“Nothing new under the sun,” said one senior executive at Pertamina. “The dominant colours changed in the past 20 years. Blue, dark blue, ocean blue, yellow, red, and red-and-white. For us, they look the same: grey,” he continued.
“Oil trading is only a fraction of Pertamina’s business. We have various kinds of procurements every day. Some are controlled by red-and-white, others by yellow or red and dark-blue. Some are linked to the active and retired Army generals, while others linked to the active and former high-ranking police officers. They are all corrupt,” another executive at subsidiary of Pertamina commented.
“One multinational oil and gas company was willing to farm-out Indonesian-flag jack-up to Pertamina for operation in South Sumatra. One should have wondered why the multinational company let go the jack-up rig. Turned out their decision was the right one, while Pertamina is now on the losing side because of way too many incidents, high turnover of crews, and really bad management only because of whatever relationship with owner of the jack-up rig,” the executive complained.
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