Word: suharto
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Welcome to the one-hand-washes-the-other world of "Jim-Bob" Moffett, a former University of Texas football star, geologist and amateur Elvis-impersonator who built Freeport into a mining behemoth with annual revenues of almost $2 billion. Moffett himself is an F.O.S., or friend of Suharto, the ousted dictator of Indonesia, a country that is now a fuse in search of a match. An often violent election campaign leads up to voting on June 7 that could bring to power reformers long critical of Freeport...
Indonesia is the site of Freeport's most important asset, the Grasberg open-pit mine, developed under the auspices of the Suharto regime. A giant crater scooped out of a mountainside in the jungles of Irian Jaya, on the Indonesian half of the island of New Guinea, the $60 billion mother lode contains one of the world's largest single deposits of copper and gold...
Moffett's Dale Carnegie routine worked wonders when Suharto ran the show. There were afternoons of golf with the ruler and friendships with his family and business cronies. Indeed, Suharto interests own a multimillion-dollar stake in the Grasberg mine, which surely did not hurt Moffett's effort to maintain mining rights there on favorable terms. The deal was so sweet, in fact, that Freeport has long been the world's lowest-cost producer of copper, a key industrial metal...
...since Suharto's ouster a year ago, Freeport's future in Indonesia has been called into question. The company's status and the allocation of its royalty payments have become a campaign issue. The company has denied any illegal behavior and notes that as one of Indonesia largest taxpayers, "it would be unusual if [we] did not maintain a close business relationship with the government of Indonesia and its officials, including then President Suharto." Fair enough, but in April, Standard & Poor's lowered its rating on $3.3 billion worth of Freeport debt and preferred stock, citing the firm's ties...
...that Freeport has misread Indonesia's political mood. If the reform-minded parties capture the majority of votes, as looks likely, and the military does not intervene, which seems plausible, popular resentment over the company's connections with Suharto might encourage the new government to re-evaluate even the revised contracts, or to further jack up royalty payments, just as copper prices seem to be turning up. That in turn could erode the firm's low-cost structure. Even worse, Jim-Bob Moffett's old friends in high places would no longer be there to help...