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Indonesian tycoon Bakrie gears up for bid to become president
MULTI-MILLIONAIRE businessman Aburizal Bakrie is limbering up for presidential elections in mid-2014 in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation.
Secular Indonesia, a hot favourite of international investors, is a sprawling archipelago of largely untapped mineral riches, an increasingly wealthy middle class and an economic growth rate last year of 6.5 per cent.
But in a country in which it is deemed unseemly to openly declare ambition, Bakrie, chairman of the nationalist Golkar Party, stressed he is merely testing the waters.
“It is not yet a campaign,” said the 65-year-old, claiming that a speech to students was only “to see what their problems are so that I can tell my legislators”.