Stephen Fitzpatrick, Jakarta – Indonesia's departing Finance Minister has taken a sharp swipe at the forces she believes made her position untenable, describing them as rapacious and "just like the New Order" of the late dictator Suharto.

Sri Mulyani Indrawati's appointment as a Washington-based managing director at the World Bank shook Indonesian politics when it was announced a fortnight ago.

Dr Indrawati, widely regarded as incorruptible and the key architect of the reform process that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono hopes will be the legacy of his leadership, had since refused to explain the reasons for her resignation as minister.

However at a forum entitled Public Policy and Ethics, attended by the cream of Indonesia's progressive and intellectual elite, the US-educated economist let fly at forces which she said were involved in politics purely for personal gain.

Although she did not mention by name businessman Aburizal Bakrie, the chairman of junior coalition partner the Golkar party and the person appointed manager of coalition business within a day of Dr Indrawati's resignation, her reference to him was too pointed to miss.

"You yourselves can see, when government officials with business backgrounds, even though they say they have put aside all their businesses, but everyone knows that their siblings, their children, who knows who else from their families, are still running the firms," she said.

The reference was clearly intended to be to Mr Bakrie, whose family business Bumi Resources is the giant of the Indonesian stock exchange.

Mr Bakrie was also coordinating minister for the economy, and then minister for people's welfare, in the first Yudhoyono government between 2004 and 2009, before retiring from representative politics to seize control of Golkar in a party room vote last year.

She also insisted that her departure from Dr Yudhoyono's government was not a defeat, despite Mr Bakrie and the Golkar party in the parliament having pursued her for the past year over the controversial 6.7 trillion rupiah Bank Century bailout.

She and current Vice President Boediono – who at the time was central bank governor – authorised that bailout whilst Dr Yudhoyono was out of the country in 2008.

A parliamentary vote late last year held the pair should be investigated for the decision – despite there being no convincing evidence presented, during a drawn-out house committee inquiry, of any criminal wrongdoing.

But Dr Indrawati insisted her move out of Dr Yudhoyono's administration and onto the world stage in Washington was a victory, because no one had been able to "dictate" what she should do, "and this includes those who wished I wasn't here".

"So long as I did not abandon the truth, so long as I did not betray my conscience, and so long as I respected my values and my dignity, then I won," she said.

Dr Indrawati, who insisted that despite not being a politician she "understood politics" (she was appointed by Dr Yudhoyono in part due to her lack of political party affiliation and her strength as a technocrat) described the situation from which she had withdrawn as being like an intolerable "marriage of interests".

The reference was to Dr Yudhoyono's strategic alliance with Mr Bakrie, as well as with the other Suharto-era forces that have increasingly asserted their crony-style power.

"There are those who have described it as a cartel, but I prefer to see it as a marriage – a same-sex marriage," she explained, to great laughter from the audience, before going on to explain she was referring to the overwhelming number of men controlling Indonesian politics.