‘I am what I am’: Indonesia’s embattled finance minister speaks out

"I’m the minister of finance in charge of handling this crisis, and that’s my commitment" Mulyani Indrawati

The meeting had been due to start at 9am but there’s no one waiting outside Mulyani’s office and after a few phone calls it emerges that she has been called away and might be available at 10.30. Mulyani has acquired a reputation among journalists as a notorious canceller of interviews, and as the clock in the plush trophy room ticks around to 11am there’s plenty of time to contemplate the enormous challenges that have confronted her at home and abroad in recent weeks. It’s late October, and the Bakrie saga is on everyone’s minds in Indonesia.

Quite apart from dealing with a financial crisis that has prompted the Indonesian rupiah to plunge to a seven-year low as investors scrambled in panic for dollars, Mulyani has had to contend with a developing saga that has threatened her government’s credibility, the national economy and indeed her own career.

Bakrie and Brothers is the holding company for a group that includes some of the country’s most prominent businesses, mainly in the energy, property and telecoms sectors, and it is in trouble. The firm was looking to raise about $1 billion to repay maturing debts, and hit upon the solution of selling its stake in Bumi Resources, a coal exporter, for $1.3 billion to a consortium headed by investment group Northstar. The collapse of the Bakrie group for failure to repay these debts would have exacerbated the effects of the financial crisis on Indonesia, so news of the sale came as relief to the administration as well as to the beleaguered company.

But there is a snag: trading of Bumi’s shares was suspended on the country’s exchange after plunging by the maximum daily limit of 10% for several consecutive days. This led to an outcry in local media that the company was receiving special treatment. Aburizal Bakrie, head of the clan although officially no longer chief of the holding company, having taken up the role of minister for welfare, was a key financier of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s 2004 campaign.

Mulyani moved to lift the suspension of trading in Bumi resources, only for the ruling to be overturned by an unnamed official in the government said by a source quoted in the Jakarta Post to be at a higher level than Mulyani. A spokesman for the president popularly known as SBY has said that he had no involvement in the decision.

Zealous campaigner

Rumours – denied by a spokesman for the government – circulated that Mulyani had threatened to resign over the issue. She is a zealous campaigner for reform, a woman who sacked the entire customs department in an effort to deal with its notorious corruption, and has reformed her own ministry. This has delighted debt bankers in Asia, who say ministry officials have become much more professional and transparent. Mulyani has also repeatedly refused to allow the vested interests of business to interfere with policy.

It is this newfound spirit of professionalism that has enabled her debt team to be among the most successful in Asia: the $1.9 billion raised by the January issuance of 10- and 30-year bonds amounts to almost a quarter of all funds raised by sovereigns in the region this year. Debt bankers who have worked with her say that the key to her success is a consultative approach. "She has done a very good job defending the interests of Indonesia with integrity and works really well with everybody," says one. "She has that ability to get given a load of documents on an issue, digest them thoroughly and then come to the point and really understand the topic."

As a former director for Asia at the IMF, Mulyani has a background in working with international financial bodies that will stand her in good stead as she negotiates at such meetings as the November G20 summit in Washington for help for Indonesia and its neighbours. She is the face of the new Indonesia, say her fans in Jakarta, the embodiment of the reformers who would see the country emerge from its reputation for corruption and cronyism to become a regional leader.

Back in the meeting room at the ministry the clock reaches 11am and there’s still no sign of Mulyani. The previous evening she had accepted an award from Euromoney for outstanding contribution to finance in recognition of her being acclaimed as minister of finance of the year for the second time. She had then delivered a long, entertaining and bilingual speech to a gathering of investors, chief executives and politicians – including the central bank governor – urging reform and quoting the film Spiderman’s maxim that "with great power, comes great responsibility".

Back to the waiting room

It transpires that her responsibilities have called her away – Mulyani is meeting the president, and won’t be available at all today. A worried-looking woman in a pale headscarf expresses her regret; someone should have called, she says, to let you know the meeting was cancelled.

A journalist is from time to time forced to concede that he or she is less deserving of a contact’s time than a president but there is something in the way the whole affair is handled that speaks to the very problems Mulyani hopes to tackle. Her staff are evasive and difficult to reach, promising to call and then disappearing for a week only to be replaced by a new person with no knowledge of previous discussions. In the weeks that follow the cancelled interview, Mulyani travels the globe attending meetings of her international peers as the global financial community attempts to decide on a joint response to the crisis. Back home, more trouble surfaces as her stand-in, minister for state enterprises Sofyan A Djalil, is revealed to own 1.1 million previously undeclared shares in Bumi at a time when the company might be bid on by state-owned firms that his office oversees. Sofyan rebutted accusations of a conflict of interest, being quoted in the Jakarta Post as saying: "There is no [conflict of interest] in this case. It has never influenced anything. What’s forbidden is for me to make a policy that benefits me personally, something that I have never done."