Asia Sentinel

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.

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.

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