Markus Junianto Sihaloho & Ezra Sihite – The Golkar Party on Monday said that the recent business saga surrounding companies belonging to the family of its chairman, Aburizal Bakrie, won't hurt his bid to become its presidential candidate.
"Business has nothing to do with [Aburizal's] nomination. Golkar is sticking with nominating Ical," Golkar politician Bambang Soesatyo said, referring to Aburizal by his nickname.
Bakrie & Brothers, controlled by Aburizal, sold half of its stake in Bumi Plc last year to tycoons Nathaniel Rothschild and Samin Tan to help pay its $1.35 billion debt owed to Credit Suisse Group.
Shares in the London-listed joint venture dropped as much as 88 percent last month after it announced an investigation into financial "irregularities" involving its Indonesian investments – Bumi Resources and Berau Coal Energy.
The probe marked the height of a dispute between Rothschild and Indonesia's prominent Bakrie family, which founded a palm oil plantation empire in 1942.
Golkar politician Bambang said the debacle had done little to tarnish Aburizal's political image, adding that the Golkar chairman only had a small stake in the joint venture.
"So it will not affect [Aburizal's] personal finance nor his family's," Bambang said. "There are ups and downs [in business], and for the Bakrie group, this is not the first storm or tsunami that they have [had] to face. But [such problems] are always overcome."
Another Golkar politician, Priyo Budi Santoso, said Aburizal was still one of the country's most popular presidential candidates, citing recent surveys conducted by prominent polling groups that found him to be one of the leading nominees.
The Indonesian Survey Circle on Monday listed Aburizal and former president Megawati Sukarnoputri as the frontrunners for the 2014 presidential election.
"We are ready to give our best, even [if it is] a head-to-head battle between Ical and Megawati," he said. "We will follow [all political] dynamics. We won't pat ourselves on the back or ignore [this survey]."
Priyo, a House of Representatives deputy speaker, noted that the landscape for the presidential race was not yet clear because the ruling Democratic Party has yet to announce its nominee.
The party's founder, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will not be eligible to run in 2014. Analysts have long speculated on who his successor might be, pointing to the lack of prominent political figures inside the party.
Rothschild and Tan have both maintained that their relationships with Bakrie are fine, but business sources in September claimed that Samin was unhappy with the market value of his shares in Bumi Plc, which had slumped from $1 billion to around $140 million.
The sources also claimed that Rothschild, owner of almost 12 percent of Bumi Plc, wanted to make Samin an ally in controlling the company. Rothschild called for a "radical cleaning" of the balance sheet and corporate culture of Bumi Resources, the reasons he claimed were behind the drop in the value of the company's shares.