'Time' magazine puts Soehartos' wealth at $15b
JAKARTA (JP): United States news magazine Time discloses in its latest weekly issue that former Indonesian president Soeharto and his children have amassed a US$15 billion fortune during his 32 years of rule.
"That includes $9 billion in cash that was transferred from a bank in Switzerland to another, presumably safer, bank in Austria shortly after Soeharto was forced from office (May 21) in 1998," said Time Inc. Asia, the publisher of the magazine, in a press release on Sunday, the eve of its circulation.
Time's cover story titled Suharto Inc. capped what the magazine claims to be the most comprehensive, four-month investigation of the Soeharto family wealth involving hundreds of interviews by its correspondents in 11 countries.
President B.J. Habibie ordered an official probe of Soeharto's assets suspected of being accumulated through corruption, collusion and nepotism but little headway has thus far been made by Attorney General Andi M. Ghalib.
Soeharto asserted in a private television interview recently that he did not have a single cent in foreign banks and he challenged the government and the general public to trace whatever wealth he possessed overseas.
Time reported the Soeharto family's $15 billion wealth consisted of cash, shares, corporate assets, real estate, jewelry and fine arts.
In the 32 years Soeharto was in power, more than $73 billion in revenues and assets passed through his and his family's hands, mainly from mining, timber and petroleum but these holdings have been reduced over the years by mismanagement and Indonesia's financial crisis, the report said.
The weekly said the Soeharto family controlled some 3.6 million hectares of real estate and owned shares in at least 564 Indonesian companies and its overseas interests which included hundreds of companies from the U.S. to Uzbekistan and from the Netherlands to Nigeria.
Time also uncovered a number of the Soeharto children's personal holdings, including a 50 percent share in a $4 million yacht moored outside Darwin, a 75 percent stake in a golf course in Ascot, England, an $8 million penthouse in Singapore and a $12 million mansion in an exclusive neighborhood of Los Angeles.
"The family's combined fleet of planes included until recently a DC-10, a Boeing-737, a Canadian Challenger 601 and a BAC-111 that an aviation expert believes once belonged to the Royal Squadron of Queen Elizabeth II," the magazine added.
The weekly quoted a former business associate of the Soeharto family as alleging that the Soeharto children skipped tax payments of $2.5 to $10 billion on commissions alone.