Editorial: SOE Commissioners are important, actually
Here’s a wild idea: what if we only hire industry professionals for these high-stakes roles?
The appointment of Ginka Ginting, a 27-year-old electoral campaign volunteer with no professional track record beyond student organizations, to the board of commissioners of PT Pertamina Retail has sparked an understandable public outburst across social media. But what followed was rather predictable: a collective, resigned shrug.
Or, as the cynics say: Isn’t it a time-honored tradition to treat the boardrooms of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and their lucrative subsidiaries as a dumping ground for political IOUs?
In 2021, rock musician Abdee of ‘Slank’ was appointed as an independent commissioner of telecommunications giant PT Telkom Indonesia. Observers have pointed out that his appointment was a ‘payback’ for his support as a campaign volunteer for then-President Jokowi’s presidential runs—both times.
Even more mind-boggling: Dede Budhyarto, another Jokowi loyalist, was unseated from his independent commissioner position in PT Pelni amid allegations of a falsified diploma from Universitas Hasanuddin.
We have also seen it with party loyalists, losing legislative candidates, and influential campaign operators for decades. So, to say that these appointments are shocking is to ignore the historical mechanics of Indonesian political coalitions. It is unfortunately a well-entrenched and thoroughly normalized status quo.
The danger of undermining the roles of commissioners
However, normalcy shouldn’t be conflated with rightfulness. The sheer persistence of political patronage in state firms has bred a dangerous cultural assumption that the role of a corporate commissioner is: (1) a symbolic, part-time honorarium; (2) a comfortable but highly compensated retirement home or a youthful stepping stone; or even worse (3) a state-funded “thank you” note.
By consistently treating commissioner seats as political currency, the state sends a damaging message to both the public and the market that corporate oversight in institutions managing trillions of rupiah of public wealth does not actually matter. It reduces a vital pillar of corporate governance to a secondary reward mechanism, operating on the assumption that a commissioner’s office exists solely to occupy space, sign papers, and collect a paycheck, without exerting any real influence over how a company is run.
This perspective fundamentally misunderstands the constitutional and corporate purpose of a commissioner. In a standard private corporation, a Board of Directors (BOD) runs the daily business, while the Board of Commissioners represents the financial and strategic interests of the shareholders who privately funded the venture.
In the context of an SOE, the ultimate shareholders are not a small group of elite venture capitalists; they are the citizens of Indonesia. Every rupiah an SOE mismanages, wastes, or loses to corruption is money pulled directly from public infrastructure, healthcare, and education.
Therefore, an SOE commissioner is legally tasked with acting as a fiduciary shield for the public. They are the frontline defense against executive incompetence and corporate malfeasance.
If the BOD takes reckless strategic risks, misallocates national assets, or engages in creative accounting to hide operational failures, it is the explicit duty of the commissioners to step in, demand an immediate course correction, or exercise their ultimate corporate power: calling a general meeting of shareholders to oust the executives.
Competence is critical for a commissioner role
To execute such a high-stakes mandate, a commissioner must possess a rigorous, non-negotiable level of professional competence. Corporate governance is not an abstract exercise in ethics or a job that can be learned via standard on-the-job training. It requires deep technical expertise in corporate finance, forensic accounting, regulatory compliance, and industrial strategy.
If a commissioner cannot read a complex balance sheet, identify hidden liabilities, or independently evaluate capital expenditure plans, they are effectively a blindfolded watchdog. They cannot audit what they do not comprehend.
When an executive board presents a polished, overly optimistic quarterly review, an unseasoned or politically appointed commissioner lacks the tools to look beneath the surface. They are left entirely vulnerable to being duped, manipulated, or managed by the very executive directors they are legally obligated to oversee. They become compliant rubber stamps, validating corporate disasters long before the public ever catches wind of them.
We do not need to look to theoretical corporate textbooks to understand what happens when an independent professional actually does the job. In fact, we have a striking historical roadmap from our own recent past.
In April 2019, the executive leadership of Garuda Indonesia proudly announced a miraculous financial turnaround, claiming a consolidated net profit of US$ 5 million for the 2018 fiscal year. It was hailed as a massive public relations victory for a deeply troubled national carrier. However, two commissioners representing a minority corporate stake, Chairal Tanjung and Dony Oskaria, flatly refused to sign off on the financial report.
Both seasoned corporate professionals with deep financial acumen, Chairal and Dony immediately spotted an egregious accounting manipulation. The executive board had recognized a 15-year, uncollected future contract with an in-flight Wi-Fi provider as immediate, current revenue.
Their professional defiance and refusal to look the other way triggered an official regulatory intervention by the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and the Finance Ministry. The subsequent forced re-audit stripped away the accounting fiction, forcing Garuda to restate its books and expose a staggering US$ 175 million net loss.
Without independent and highly competent professionals willing to disrupt the boardroom peace, a massive deception would have sailed through unnoticed, hiding systemic operational rot beneath a veneer of fake profitability.
A glaring contradiction
The ultimate structural irony of today’s political appointments sits at the very pinnacle of Indonesia’s current economic architecture.
Dony Oskaria—the very man who blew the whistle at Garuda and saved the public from a massive corporate lie—now serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Danantara and Head of the SOE Regulatory Agency. Danantara has been engineered as a revolutionary sovereign wealth fund and a superholding entity designed to consolidate, restructure, and supercharge Indonesia’s sprawling state assets into a lean, globally competitive economic engine.
The current administration has repeatedly positioned Danantara as a historic step toward world-class corporate governance, efficiency, and credibility in international markets. Dony knows better than anyone in the country that rigorous, independent, and fiercely professional oversight is what prevents state assets from collapsing under the weight of inefficiency and corruption.
Yet, a glaring contradiction is that while the upper echelons of government build Danantara to project global financial sophistication, the ground-level reality of subsidiary appointments remains unchanged. The state cannot credibly claim to be building a world-class asset management system while simultaneously handing out seats on subsidiary boards, such as Pertamina Retail, to amateurs who have never managed a corporate balance sheet.
Are we paying commissioners too much?
This governance failure is made even worse by the extraordinary and often hidden compensation packages attached to the commissioner roles. In Indonesia’s SOE ecosystem, a commissioner’s remuneration is legally pegged to the executive payroll. A President Commissioner receives roughly 45 percent of the CEO’s salary, while an ordinary commissioner is entitled to 90 percent of that amount—effectively taking home around 40.5 percent of the chief executive’s baseline pay.
Previously, this baseline was routinely multiplied by massive corporate tantiem (performance bonuses) carved directly out of the company’s net profits. We’ll give Danantara credit for eliminating this practice.
In mature corporate governance models, non-executive board directors are typically compensated with flat, reasonable annual retainers and modest meeting fees. This structure is intentional; it ensures that their financial well-being is not overly dependent on executive performance metrics, thereby preserving their absolute independence to critique the management.
In Indonesia, we have flipped the script entirely. We have created a system where political appointees are paid a king’s ransom for part-time, non-executive oversight, all while requiring absolutely zero professional skin in the game.
For example, members of the Board of Commissioners at PT Bank Mandiri Tbk were paid a total of Rp5 billion (US$ 270,000). By contrast, an independent board member at ICBC—a Chinese SOE bank generating roughly 13 times more net profit than Mandiri and is the biggest bank in the world—was compensated just RMB 400,000-500,000 (US $70,000) that same year. The year before, when the tantiem had not been scrapped, Kompas reported a single commissioner at PT Bank Mandiri Tbk was paid Rp 38 billion (US$ 2.4 million) in 2024.
Bring back meritocracy to the boardroom
If Danantara and the broader Indonesian state enterprise sector are ever to be taken seriously by international investors, the government must permanently dismantle this political welfare system. SOEs are commercial entities funded by the public sacrifice, not private piggy banks or political rewards. We must establish rigid, transparent, and legally binding meritocratic criteria for all commissioner appointments across every tier of state-owned enterprises and their subsidiaries.
The criteria must demand proven track records in corporate leadership, financial management, or sector-specific technical expertise. A political campaign or a loyal network should never serve as a substitute for a professional resume. Indonesia faces complex global economic headwinds that require our state enterprises to operate at maximum efficiency and peak transparency. To achieve this, we desperately need sharp, uncompromised professionals who know how to guard the national treasury, not a continuous rotation of political loyalists who are just happy to be in the room.