Jakarta – State companies have failed to settle at least Rp 15 trillion (about US$1.3 billion) in matured overseas debts, the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) says.
The KPK said that if not addressed immediately, the debt could cause losses to the state coffers.
Haryono Umar, KPK deputy chairman for prevention, told The Jakarta Post Saturday the figures had come from the commission's calculations based on data from the Office of the State Ministry for State Enterprises.
KPK had involved in the issue in the first place as it has the potential to cause state losses, he added. "The loans were due from a long time ago and some of them were not settled immediately, causing the unpaid value to increase," he said.
Haryono did not mention as to when the loans were taken up and started to mature, only saying that, based on the ministry's data, there were 44 loan agreements involving a total of Rp 49 trillion in foreign debts, of which Rp 15 trillion were non-performing.
He did not mention either which state companies that had failed so far to fulfill their obligations, saying the commission was still gathering more data to look deeper into the issue.
"We will look further into this matter to find out what's causing these state firms to fail in paying their loans on time by communicating with the office of the state ministry for state enterprises," he said.
"We'll investigate whether the state companies use the loans accordingly or not. If they can not provide us with the evidence, there might be a case of irregularities or even corruption."
In response, State Minister for State Enterprises Sofyan A. Djalil said Saturday he had no knowledge of the KPK findings. "I don't know where they get the figures from?"
He said that in general, state companies were in no problems whatsoever in meeting their debt obligations, in part because basically the government – as the majority shareholders – guaranteed the loans and the firms needed approval from a foreign loan team before they could borrow money from overseas.
Sofyan said his ministry would verify the findings with the KPK to seek clarification.
Said Didu, the secretary to the minister, disputed the KPK findings, saying that by the ministry's calculation, the non-performing loans were actually estimated at around Rp 5 trillion. "What caused the loans to be non-performing was that there were some errors in the bookkeepings, and some of the SOE's projects were conducted without proper feasibility studies," he said.
The ministry has reported that last year, there were 23 state companies suffered from losses which amounted toRp 14 trillion, mostly due to the foreign exchange losses as the rupiah weakened against the US dollar.
Of the total losses, PLN contributed around 90 percent, or Rp 13.1 trillion, of which Rp 10 trillion came from forex losses. In 2007, the company suffered close to Rp 6 trillion in net losses. Overall, aside from 23 loss-making state owned enterprises, state firms booked a total of about Rp 75 trillion in 2008 in unaudited profits, a rather lower performance than the projected Rp 81 trillion. The estimated aggregated 2008 net profits were only a 4.7 percent increase on those of 2007. (fmb)