Farewell to Asia’s greatest kleptocrat

2 February 2008

Eric Ellis says the death of Indonesia’s former dictator may spur attempts to recover the loot accumulated by his family

Coming from the despised Siti, the remark drew scornful laughs from Indonesians. A forgiving people, they have been remarkably charitable to her father: eulogies have mostly been infused with the warmth reserved for a favourite uncle. But Indonesians have no time for his grasping children. In Suharto’s heyday, there was barely a business they did not monopolise; transport, mining, agriculture, property, telecoms, media, airlines, car-making, hotels. Time magazine tallied the children’s wealth at $5.4 billion a year after Indonesia’s economy collapsed from the Asian financial crisis. Bankers who knew them well said Time was conservative.

For three decades, it was almost impossible to spend rupiah and not make a Suharto richer, even in mundane matters of state. Issuing driving licences were outsourced to Siti and ID cards to eldest son Sigit’s wife, while grandson Ari collected alcohol tax, a nice little earner which ended only when boozers boycotted beer in protest.

Suharto’s wife Tien was inevitably known as ‘Madame Tien Per Cent’. The family controlled massive slabs of Borneo, plundering it for timber, coal and palm oil. They owned a third of Timor — East and West — and stripped timber and coffee from both. Their greed was most egregiously expressed in 1997, when they seized the supposedly massive Busang gold deposit in Kalimantan, which had been setting share markets alight. Eggs splattered over family faces when it was revealed that the mine’s samples were salted with a Canadian fraudster’s gold dust.

Indonesians nicknamed Siti ‘Tutut’, to acknowledge the foreign-funded tollroad monopoly she owned. In artful mouths, it sounded like a car horn, and was punned into an acronym in Bahasa that neatly captured how the family accumulated its wealth, Tanpa Usaha Tapi Untung Terus: ‘without effort but always gaining riches’.

The larceny finally ended in 1998. At least that’s what the family want Indonesians to believe — that what little they had disappeared in the collapsed economy that followed Suharto’s fall from power. Were it true, it would mean there was no need for the state to make good its threat to go after their loot.