Jakarta – The Business Competition Supervisory Agency (KPPU), the nation's official antimonopoly watchdog, has urged the government to stop granting new monopolies so as to ensure equal opportunities for all business players.

KPPU member Muhammad Iqbal said Monday in Jakarta that a number of government directives, particularly presidential decrees, continued to encourage monopolies by giving exclusive rights to individual companies in particular business fields.

"Such monopolistic policies need to be ended to ensure a level playing field for all those involved in business," he stressed.

He said that the KPPU strongly supported a recent Supreme Court decision that annulled a ministerial decree granting exclusive rights for the production of holograms. But he added that the government needed to take the initiative itself to revoke a number of regulations that granted monopolies.

In its decision, the Supreme Court struck down a 1979 decree of the finance minister granting a monopoly over the production of holograms for excise stamps to state-owned security printing firm Perum Peruri and privately owned PT Pura Nusa Persada.

The Monopolies Law was enacted in 1999 to promote fair business practices. But even though the law has been in effect for almost six years, a large number of government projects are carried out based on ministerial decrees that grant exclusive rights or monopolies.

Another KPPU member, Tadjuddin Noersaid, said that these mistrial decrees legalized "conspiracies" between state officials and those involved in government projects, thus leading to a lack of competition.

"We gave the government six months after the issuance of the 1999 law to review the regulations in line with the Monopolies Law," he said, "However, there are still a lot of regulations that fail to comply with the legislation." He added that the KPPU had criticized many ministerial decrees granting monopolies, but only a few of them had been revised, such as the trade and industry minister's 1998 decree on oil distribution and the transportation minister's 1997 decree on air fares.

He said that the government should refrain from granting any more monopolies like the one granted to Peruri and its private sector supplier.

Since 1995, Peruri has had just one supplier of holograms, PT Pura Nusa Persada, in line with the decree, which has no expiry date.

The KPPU ruled in 2004 that the two companies should terminate their contract, and instructed Peruri to hold an open tender for the subsequent procurement of holograms. The two companies, however, contested the ruling and brought the case to the Kudus District Court, in Central Java, which overturned the KPPU's decision.

The KPPU then appealed to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled in its favor.