Prominent Widodo critic arrested days into new Indonesian president’s reign

A former Indonesian trade minister who campaigned for the opposition has been arrested in the first days of Prabowo Subianto’s presidency on alleged corruption offences from almost 10 years ago, raising questions about whether the timing is a coincidence or a message from the new administration.

Thomas Lembong, who is well known and respected in Australian political circles, is accused of granting an import permit for more than 100,000 tonnes of raw sugar to a private company in 2015 without proper cross-government consultation and when the country was already in surplus.

Thomas Lembong (centre, green tie) having fun with Malcolm Turnbull and Joko Widodo during a visit to Jakarta’s Tanah Abang market in November 2015.Credit: AP

Lembong was former leader Joko Widodo’s trade minister at the time and later served as his investment chief, playing key roles in the Australia-Indonesia free trade deal and in improving the two nations’ sometimes fractious relationship.

Former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull named the Harvard-educated investment banker in his 2020 autobiography as facilitating what became a strong friendship between him and Widodo.

But early in Widodo’s second term from 2019, Lembong became a critic of many of the president’s signature policies, including infrastructure spending, nickel downstreaming and construction of a new capital city on Borneo.

Lembong joined the campaign team of presidential candidate Anies Baswedan – the most strident opponent of Widodo’s chosen successor and election victor, Prabowo Subianto.

Prabowo, who lost presidential elections to the immensely popular Widodo in 2014 and 2019, sought to join the bandwagon for 2024 rather than fight against it. With Widodo constitutionally barred from running for a third term, the ex-general and longtime son-in-law of autocrat Suharto promised policy continuity, making the point – and gaining Widodo’s tacit endorsement – by selecting the president’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, as his vice-presidential running mate.

They were inaugurated on October 20, two scions of powerful families. The rapid arrest of such a high-profile critic of the Widodo-Prabowo order has raised the eyebrows of those intently watching the new administration for signals about how it intends to run the world’s third-largest democracy.

“The people I’ve been chatting to in Indonesia are definitely interpreting this as some kind of warning,” said Murdoch University Indonesia expert Ian Wilson, commenting on perceptions of the arrest and not the specifics of the case against Lembong.

“He is a popular figure, who is a confidant of Anies Baswedan. That’s not to say Prabowo ordered this or anything of that kind of conspiratorial nature, but that might be the way it is understood.”

Said Didu, from the Anies campaign, said Lembong’s arrest was “politically based and cherry picking”. He refuted all the allegations.

Briefly fronting media this week, Lembong said: “I leave it all up to God Almighty.”

Indonesia’s Attorney-General’s Office volunteered on Wednesday that there was no political motivation behind the high-profile move against Lembong.

“It’s about law enforcement,” spokesman Harli Siregar said. “The investigation started in October 2023, so it is exactly a year ago. But every case has its own characteristics. We cannot equate one case to another. There are levels of difficulties faced by investigators.”

Prabowo Subianto delivers a speech during the presidential inauguration ceremony on October 20.Credit: AP

The Attorney-General’s Office also argued that Lembong went against regulations by granting the sugar import permit to a private company when such a job was for state-owned enterprises.

Investigators have not said what he gained or stood to gain from his allegedly corrupt actions. In addition to Lembong, they arrested Charles Sitorus, a business development director with a state-owned enterprise, alleging the complex web of sugar transfers and sales cost Indonesia millions of dollars.

“There is a lot of corruption in high-level politics,” Wilson said. “So when someone is arrested or charged, the interpretative framework is not simply we’ve caught a bad guy, but usually why this particular person.

“The question that a lot of people are asking and not really being able to answer yet is: what does this mean?”

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