JAKARTA -(Dow Jones)- Indonesia hopes to attract as much as $12 billion in investments in its massive geothermal resources during an event in Bali next month, a government official said Thursday. Bambang Setiawan, Director General of Mineral Resources, Coal, and Geothermal at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources told reporters that investments of that size would be needed to help Indonesia add a total 4,700 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity over the next few years.

March 11 (Bloomberg) -- Indonesian President Bambang Susilo Yudhoyono said expanding trade links with Australia is an opportunity for companies to invest in his country’s energy-rich eastern region. Yudhoyono, speaking to business leaders in Sydney today on the final day of his three-day visit to Australia, said he agreed in talks with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that there’s room to grow trade relations. Indonesia is Australia’s 13th-largest trading partner.

The government said on Wednesday that it would only demand dividends of about 35 percent from the three state-owned mining companies this year to give the firms more money to invest in their businesses. The companies, two of which saw profits tumble in 2009 due to falling global commodity prices, usually pay about half of their profits in dividends.

Indonesia's president has finished his three-day trip to Australia with a sales pitch calling on Australian businesses to invest in Indonesia. In the last formal engagement of his trip, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono addressed a hand-picked gathering of business leaders and dignitaries in Sydney. Amongst them were former prime minister Paul Keating, former New South Wales premiers Bob Carr and Nick Greiner, and Trade Minister Simon Crean.

About six geothermal power plant projects, which were supposed to be built by PT PLN under the second 10,000 megawatts (MW) electricity crash program, will be transferred to private power producers (IPPs) as the state power company faces difficulties in securing financing for the projects, an official said. The energy and mineral resources ministry’s decree No.

TEMPO Interactive, Jakarta:The government will give priority to create conditions that will prevent people from carrying out corruption. This is intended as a preemptive move towards bureaucratic reforms, said State Minister for Administrative Reforms E.E. Mangindaan, following a meeting at the Vice Presidential Office yesterday.

Jakarta (ANTARA News) - Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the country`s economic growth in the first quarter of this year was believed to reach over five percent. "We have a growth estimate but in the first quarter it could reach over five percent," the minister said at the office of the chief economic minister here on Wednesday.