Racial issue upsets business tycoons

Racial issue upsets business tycoons

JAKARTA (JP): Businessman Sofyan Wanandi called on the public over the weekend to stop raising the Chinese-Indigene racial issue because it could discourage tycoons from helping small- scale businesses and cooperatives.

Sofyan said that the country's tycoons, mostly of Chinese origin, had provided much assistance in management and finance to small-scale businesses and cooperatives, in accordance with their promise at their meeting last year in Jimbaran, Bali.

The help from the Jimbaran group -- the name given to the participants of the Jimbaran meeting -- had really paid off because some small-scale businesses had become stronger, he said, without naming any of them.

Jimbaran group members, often branded "unnationalistic", provided such help because they cared about the country, said Sofyan, who heads the Gemala group.

However, some people still upset the tycoons by continuing to raise the Chinese-Indigene issue, he said.

"We hope this unfriendly issue is not raised again," Antara reported Sofyan saying during the national meeting of Golkar's Institute for the Support of Small and Medium-scale Businesses and Cooperatives.

Sofyan, who is known as the Jimbaran group's spokesman, promised that the group would more actively help small-scale businesses and cooperatives, as well as the poor throughout the country, once the racial issue was not heard again.

Sofyan also denied the allegation that the Chinese tycoons were not interested in investing in the eastern part of Indonesia because of small-profit prospect. He said some of them have invested in fishery, plantation and tourism.

He acknowledged that none of the investments were categorized as large-scale investments.

He said it was because the tycoons thought the eastern part of Indonesia was not yet ready to absorb large-scale investment due to lack of population. (jsk)