Hide the Ferrari, Pay Your Tax: Jakarta Graft-Buster Is Back
- $300 billion may be stashed abroad. Amnesty seeks its return
- ‘I’m not coming back to Indonesia to create fear:’ Indrawati
Several luxury vehicles at the compound of Indonesia's anti corruption agency in Jakarta. Indonesia plans to get back stashed overseas money and increase domestic tax revenue by using an ambitious amnesty plan aimed at raising $165 trillion rupiah ($12.5 billion) before it ends in March.
Photographer: Romeo Gacad/AFP via Getty ImagesAll over Jakarta, people may soon start hiding their Ferraris.
That’s because Indonesia’s graft-busting Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati, who was more or less driven into exile in Washington six years ago after trying to clean up corruption, is back in town. On her reform agenda: lure back what Jakarta officials estimate is more than $300 billion that fled to Singapore and elsewhere during Indonesia’s periods of political turmoil, out of the hands of the nation’s tax collectors; reduce the number of domestic tax cheats; and take up reform of the tax office itself, which she had to abandon in 2010 when the opposition against her plans grew too fierce.