Kadin and dialog with the President

I would like to assure readers and Ong Hock Chuan, writing in The Jakarta Post of Sept. 8, that nobody thwarted the dialog between the President and foreign investors recently, least of all, the President's men.

The Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin) and the foreign investment community alike wanted to communicate their concerns to the President and his economic team and to determine whether they understood these concerns. They were not interested in an adversarial approach as suggested in the article. As a matter of fact, we had the option of having a free flow of questions from the floor, however the organizing committee decided that it would not have been productive.

Instead, the Forum included a second session with the Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Aburizal Bakrie, and the Minister for Manpower and Transmigration, Fahmi Idris, designed precisely to enable participants to ask questions freely on the details of policy.

The Minister of Finance, Jusuf Anwar, had also confirmed his participation but unfortunately due to rupiah volatility on that day he was unable to be present. Since technical questions were to be directed to the ministers in this second session, the organizing committee requested the opportunity to provide some commentaries after the speech of the president.

Most importantly, the air of trust established around the recent Forum helped pave the way for the notion of holding regular dialog sessions between the President and the investment community, including foreign investors, where specific and ongoing issues and solutions will be discussed. That is what we wanted.

OHN A. PRASETIO, Vice Chairman Kadin Indonesia, Jakarta