Jakarta – In the first case of its kind in Indonesia, people in the oil-rich province of Riau have sued President B.J. Habibie for 22.5 billion dollars in compensation for lost oil revenues, reports said Tuesday.
The first hearing in the class action suit was held Monday in a court in the Riau city of Pakenbaru, the Kompas daily said.
Co-defendants were Minister of Mines and Energy Kuntoro Mangkusubroto, the state oil company Pertamina, PT Caltex Pacific Indonesia – a subsidiary of the US Caltex Petroleum Corporation – and the minister of home affairs, Kompas said.
But only two of the defendants showed up for the hearing – PT Caltex and the local office of the mines and energy ministry – represented by their lawyers.
Riau province on the island of Sumatra is home to Indonesia's giant Minas oil field, which is operated by Caltex and produces some 750,000 barrels of oil a day, or about half Indonesia's daily crude oil output.
Tabrani Rab, representing the plaintiffs, "the people of Riau," is chairman of the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies in the province and has in the past aired the possibility of an independent Riau.
"We will summon other defendants, including President Habibie. If they still fail to show up, the trial will still be convened," presiding judge T. Simanjuntak was quoted as saying by Kompas.
In their suit, the plaintiffs said Habibie, who took office in May of last year, had ordered the minister of mines and energy to exploit oil in the province, in cooperation with Caltex and Pertamina, which resulted in a revenues worth 2.004 trillion rupiah (2.3 billion dollars).
Habibie, they said, had promised in July last year to give a 10- percent share of the revenues to the plaintiff within two months. But until now, almost nine months after he made the promise, they have not received their share, they said.
Their primary demands were for Habibie's policy to be declared a "mistake" and a halt to oil exploitation by Caltex and Pertamina. A secondary demand was freedom for the province to exploit local natural resources, or to form an independent state.
The issue of revenue sharing between Jakarta and the provinces is now before the national parliament in the form of a bill which has been harshly criticized by reformist economists for not going far enough.
Foreign oil companies, who work in Indonesia on an 80-20 profit sharing basis, say that their contracts stipulate that part of the 80 percent handed to Pertamina is earmarked for provincial development, but that it never leaves Jakarta.
The people of the remote province of Irian Jaya, home to one of the world's largest copper and gold mines operated by PT Freeport Indonesia of the United States, have been clamoring for years for a share of the mine's revneues.