Export Prices Allegedly Manipulated Through Singapore, Purbaya Forms Special Team

The government has begun investigating alleged manipulation of export prices for Indonesia’s strategic commodities via intermediary companies in Singapore. Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa said indications of under invoicing and transfer pricing practices were found in exports of crude palm oil (CPO) and coal. The investigation followed President Prabowo Subianto raising concerns about under invoicing at several cabinet meetings. As a follow-up, the Ministry of Finance has formed a special team to trace export transaction patterns deemed suspicious. ‘So whenever there is something like this, I immediately came to NSW, the National Single Window, which is under the Ministry of Finance,’ Purbaya said at a press conference at the Indonesian House of Representatives (DPR) on Wednesday (20/5/2026). The team was asked to randomly review export/import data for 10 CPO exporters and a number of shipments from each company. The results of the tracing showed patterns of shipments from Indonesia to affiliated companies in Singapore before being sent to destination countries such as the United States. The ships are said to depart directly from Indonesia to the US. However, the transactions were first recorded through companies in Singapore. ‘The ship is the same, the volume is the same, but the price is different,’ Purbaya said. The data were then matched with Indonesia’s export data using AI. The matching results showed that the price of the commodity when leaving Indonesia for Singapore was much lower than the price when entering the United States. From the samples examined, the average price in the destination country was said to be about twice that of the export price from Indonesia.