A country of looters

Many, if not most, Indonesian people would agreed with Media Indonesia (Sept. 12) description of the country as land of looters, especially with the recent unraveling of a crude oil smuggling ring consisting, mostly, of state oil and gas company (PT Pertamina) officials, who have siphoned off huge quantities of oil causing the state Rp 8.8 trillion (US$850 million) in losses a year.

Here is a situation where one of the nation's most valuable resources is stolen by individuals in formidable amounts. An even larger plunder is in the form of illegal logging, which over many years has caused the state to lose an estimated Rp 15 trillion a month; equivalent to Rp 180 trillion or around $18 billion a year in Sumatra alone (The Jakarta Post, July 7, 2004).

We would need a pretty long list to name all the nation's assets that are being stripped, resulting in a huge number of state funds being stolen and misappropriated.

As far as the PT Pertamina case is concerned, the fuel shortages that have plagued areas throughout the country for the past few months would never have happened had efficient work practices been adopted by its boards of directors and commissioners.

However, inefficiency, rather than a prudent application of risk management has become their hallmark. As a result, rampant smuggling has caused this this state-owned company to suffer a gradual decline in its production, with the country since last year becoming a net oil importer.

Those stealing the oil not only include PT Pertamina officials and their accomplices, but also the distributors that sell gasoline and diesel fuel.

Despite PT Pertamina's efforts to crack down on 52 gas stations for meter tampering five months ago, investigators found 14 gas stations in Jakarta still fiddling the meters last week, ripping off a combined Rp 905 million from their customers from July to September this year (Media Indonesia, Sept. 15).

Smuggling and corruption in Pertamina, meanwhile, goes on at all levels, even at the signing of production-sharing contracts. Since the establishment of the Oil and Gas Business Activity Executive Agency (BPKU), the supervision process regarding the sale of oil from off-shore oil rigs has become unclear, unlike during the period when PT Pertamina was in control of production sharing contracts.

Why do these cases continue to repeat? It is because of the inefficient performance of Pertamina management and their lax internal supervision?

M. RUSDI, Jakarta