Kadin and dialog with the President

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