Prabowo Highlights Economic Leakage and Cooking Oil Scarcity

President Prabowo Subianto has highlighted the practices of transfer pricing, under-invoicing, and smuggling that are causing national economic leakage. Speaking at a Plenary Cabinet Session at the State Palace in Jakarta on Monday, the President stated that these illegal activities are severely detrimental to the nation by draining large amounts of national wealth overseas. “The practices of under-invoicing, falsification of reports, transfer pricing, smuggling practices—these are things that are truly nonsensical and unfair to our nation,” Prabowo told the ministers of the Merah Putih Cabinet. The President cited the previous scarcity of cooking oil as a clear example of economic governance failure. He remarked that it was absurd for the world’s largest palm oil producer to experience a domestic shortage of cooking oil for weeks. Prabowo warned that economic leakage, amounting to hundreds of billions of US dollars, must not be allowed to continue. He asserted that the government has a mandate from the people to resolve these systemic issues thoroughly. The mid-year Plenary Cabinet Session also served as a forum to evaluate the performance of the Merah Putih Cabinet and prepare strategically for the upcoming State Address scheduled for 16 August 2026.