Inhutani says it may sell stakes

JAKARTA (JP): State-owned forestry companies said on Monday they might sell all their stakes in joint-venture industrial timber estates to their partners.

The president of state-owned forestry company PT Inhutani III, Soeyoto Wongsoredjo, said the company would quit its joint- venture firm because it had no money to support the firm's operations.

"Unless the acreage of the timber estates is lessened, we would rather sell our shares to our partners," he said on Monday.

Soeyoto said that Inhutani III, Finnish forestry company Enso and Gudang Garam had agreed to jointly develop a 300,000-hectare timber estate in Kalimantan.

"But due to our financing difficulties we have asked our partners either to develop the project by themselves or decrease the acreage," he said.

Soeyoto said Inhutani III would have to withdraw from the joint venture after it failed to obtain capital from the government.

Minister of Forestry and Plantations Muslimin Nasution said in a recent directive that he would soon revoke ministerial decree No. 57/1995, which stipulates that the equity of a joint-venture industrial timber estate consists of government shares derived from the reforestation fund (14 percent), private capital (21 percent), interest-free loans from the reforestation fund (32.5 percent) and commercial loans.

President of PT Inhutani II M. Said told the same news conference that the company had agreed to sell its shares in logging company PT Menara Hutan Buana, controlled by Probosutedjo who is a half brother of ailing former president Soeharto.

He said a foreign investor had made a proposal to the forestry minister for buying Inhutani II shares. He declined to give details.

Said added that Inhutani II's divestment was also being forced by a lack of funds.

Until now, he said, government capital and soft loans derived from the reforestation fund in Menara Hutan Buana, which manages an 80,000-hectare estate in South Kalimantan, reached at least Rp 140 billion. (01)