Word: suhartos
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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During his long reign, Suharto led an outwardly modest life. Behind the facade, however, he showed an appetite for making money. In the 1950s, he was allegedly involved in sugar smuggling that may have cost him command of an army division during a 1959 anticorruption drive. Suharto asserts that he bartered sugar for rice to ease a local food shortage and did not benefit personally, but he was transferred to a less influential position at the army staff college...
...Suharto Inc. began to take shape. Before being officially named President, Suharto issued Decree No. 8, allowing him to seize two conglomerates with combined assets of $2 billion. They were recast as PT Pilot Project Berdikari, one of the companies that became a main lever of the family empire. But the bedrock of the Suharto fortune was the presidential yayasan, or foundation. Dozens were set up, ostensibly as charities, and they have in fact funded a large number of hospitals, schools and mosques. However, the foundations were also giant slush funds for investment projects of the Suhartos and their cronies...
Soon after Suharto's resignation, then-Attorney General Soedjono examined the books of the four largest yayasan. "Suharto had distributed the money to his children and friends," he says. Soedjono discovered that one of the largest foundations had disbursed 84% of its funds on unauthorized pursuits, including loans to companies owned by Suharto's children and friends. Suharto, as chairman, had had to sign any check over $50,000. Soedjono submitted a preliminary report on his findings to President Habibie last June and was fired five hours later. (Habibie says Soedjono was dismissed because he stepped outside the line...
...children," as the Suharto offspring are known, were key participants in the family treasure hunt. Sigit, the eldest son, was apparently pushed into business by his mother, Madam Tien, whose own behind-the-scenes dealings in the 1970s earned her the nickname "Madam Tien Percent." Two sources who worked on Jakarta's Soekarno-Hatta International Airport project say that by the time its two terminals were finished in 1984, $78.2 million had been handed to Sigit in markups that appeared as cost overruns. Second son Bambang was given a slice of the lucrative business of importing and distributing basic commodities...
...Neither Suharto nor his children responded to requests for interviews, though lawyers for the former President and son Bambang asserted that their clients did nothing illegal. "He told me, 'I don't have one cent abroad,'" says Otto Cornelis Kaligis, Suharto's top lawyer, of his client...