Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor – Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono is a force working against corruption and poor governance in Indonesian society.

Despite the revelations from WikiLeaks, the net contribution of SBY to Indonesian life has been to reduce corruption and enhance the quality of governance.

The WikiLeaks cables allege that SBY's family is engaging in business in a fashion that seeks to take advantage of their proximity to the President, and that he exerted pressure to stop a prosecution and has used the state intelligence agency to gather political intelligence on other figures in Indonesian politics.

It also alleges that SBY's former vice-president, Yusuf Kalla, spent a lot of money to secure the chairmanship of the Golkar Party (not SBY's party).

It is important to note that SBY denies all the allegations and that none of them is proved.

Before he entered politics, SBY was a general in the Indonesian army, in which, above a certain rank, it is not uncommon for money to change hands in relation to promotions.

This hardly makes Indonesia unique. It is very similar to the situation in 18th-century Britain.

Similarly, the Indonesian army, even today, engages in a great many business activities. The senior officers involved generally make some money but they also use those funds to run their units. SBY's reputation within the army was as a cleanskin.

Indonesia is a country of 240 million people. Its politics are complex and sprawling. Like most democratic politics, they involve a great deal of money.

Senior politicians often need to raise and dispose of a great deal of money, perhaps indirectly, even if they are not profiting from it personally.

Indonesia is also still a poor country and corruption is widespread. A great deal of that is what you might call salary corruption, in which individuals try to get their pay up to a point where they can take care of their families.

There is absolutely no doubt that compared with former Asian leaders such as Suharto or Ferdinand Marcos, SBY is a pillar of propriety and good governance. Suharto and Marcos used their power to decree that significant sections of the economies of their nations would fall into their hands or those of their families. Nothing remotely like that goes on under SBY.

In some respects, SBY has disappointed his supporters since his re-election because the pace of reform has been very slow. But he is the creator and enabler of Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission, the KPK, which has put many corrupt Indonesians, at very senior levels, in jail.

By any reasonable standard, SBY must be judged to be a corruption buster and someone who has tried to improve the overall quality of governance.