Michael Richardson, Jakarta – A group of Indonesia's wealthiest companies has agreed to intensify a program to help smaller businesses in what analysts said Sunday was an attempt to defuse government and public criticism for doing too little to bridge the gap between rich and poor.
The group's spokesman, Sukamdani Sahid Gitosardjono, head of one of the country's biggest hotel and real-estate conglomerates, said the formation of the group of 79 big businesses was a response to the government's insistence that more must be done to overcome poverty.
The move follows several serious riots in various parts of the country in which wealth disparity was evidently an underlying cause.
President Suharto has warned that a growing wealth gap could lead to more widespread social unrest and weaken national unity. He declared last month that wealthy Indonesians who did not heed the call to help the poor could have their houses marked to shame them.
Mr. Sukamdani said the newly formed business group had decided to set up a body to organize and coordinate all activities related to partnership programs with smaller businesses.
"We have all actually established partnerships with small businesses and cooperatives," he said. "Now we want to make them more intensive." Areas to be examined, Mr. Sukamdani said, would include provision of managerial and technical assistance and low-interest loans.
Similar measures have already been implemented by another group of 48 heads of major Indonesian businesses, who met in Jimbaran, Bali, in 1995.
The so-called Jimbaran Group also pledged to help redress social disparities that have become more obvious in recent years as deregulation has made Indonesia rely increasingly on market forces to generate economic growth and jobs.
The Jimbaran Group claims to have spent more than 2.1 trillion rupiah ($884.2 million) in 1996 on cooperative programs with small and medium-sized enterprises.
Such smaller companies, which include subcontractors, retailers, workshops and cottage businesses, have the potential to create employment in a country where the government says that more than 25 million of the country's nearly 200 million population lives below the official poverty line.
In a related development, Indonesia's business elite has indicated that it will comply with a controversial regulation being drafted by the Finance Ministry to raise more money for poverty alleviation programs overseen by Mr. Suharto.
The regulation would enforce a presidential decree issued last month requiring individual and corporate taxpayers with net annual incomes exceeding 100 million rupiah to pay 2 percent of their net income to support government programs to assist the poor.
An estimated 11,000 corporate and individual taxpayers should be subject to the surcharge. Most foreign multinationals are expected to go along with the charge.