October 2, 2025 | 09:57 am
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The selection of Anggito Abimanyu as Chief of the Deposit Insurance Corporation disregards propriety and transparency, serving as a buffer for Prabowo’s priority programs.
NOT only in his speech, Finance Minister Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa is also like a cowboy when it comes to making decisions. As Chair of the Indonesian Deposit Insurance Corporation (LPS) Board of Commissioners selection committee, he named Anggito Abimanyu as a prospective commissioner after registrations had closed.
Only three days before the selection by the House of Representatives (DPR) on September 22, 2025, Purbaya proposed Anggito’s name to President Prabowo Subianto, who then forwarded it to the DPR. As the leading candidate, Anggito was smoothly elected as Chair of the LPS Board of Commissioners for 2025 to 2030.
Anggito never registered for the job of LPS commissioner. His name was put forward to replace Purbaya, the previous incumbent, who was appointed Finance Minister on September 8, 2025. This means that the fit-and-proper test for the LPS commissioners was nothing more than a sham. The name of the LPS Board of Commissioners Chair was already decided without needing a fit-and-proper test.
If Purbaya had not been appointed Finance Minister, the DPR would certainly have selected him once again as LPS Chief. The other candidates were only window dressing, making up the numbers in the selection process. No matter how impressive or extensive their financial knowledge, they would not have been chosen as chair because they were not members of the government’s crony network.
The contrived selection of Anggito Abimanyu could become Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa’s first scandal as Finance Minister. As well as ignoring the selection process, he also circumvented the procedures laid down in law for selecting a public official. Because he never registered, Anggito became a commissioner without going through the proper selection process.
Minister Purbaya should have selected one of the previous unsuccessful candidates as his replacement. But because they did not have the right connections to the government, they did not appear on Purbaya’s radar. Anggito, the current Deputy Finance Minister, was included on the list of prospective commissioners.
Anggito is the right man to be a candidate not following the proper procedures. In 2014, he wrote an article entitled A Proposal for Disaster Insurance in Kompas daily. It turned out that the article was a copy of a 2006 article written by Hotbonar Sinaga. As a result of this scandal, Anggito resigned as an economics and business lecturer at Gadjah Mada University.
Administratively, Agito’s appointment might not have been illegal. Although it was rather hasty, his nomination followed procedure: proposed by the selection committee, approved by the President and then selected by the DPR. However, the way it was carried out violated the principle of propriety and transparency in the selection of public officials.
An improper selection process with an aroma of cronyism could undermine the legitimacy of Anggito’s position as LPS Chief. Public trust in the banks, which come within the LPS’s scope of work, could be lost as a result of this unseemly selection.
And this is even more true if Anggito was put in place to smooth the way for Prabowo Subianto’s priority programs. Minister Purbaya has only recently withdrawn Rp200 trillion of state reserve funds from Bank Indonesia to be channeled to state banks to provide productive loans to stimulate the economy. The LPS is responsible for monitoring these disbursements to ensure they do not become bad loans.
With Anggito at the Deposit Insurance Corporation, these credit flows could be diverted to become loans to support Prabowo’s programs, such as funding for the red-and-white cooperatives. Many economists have warned that the risk of bad loans to these cooperatives is very high because of the uncertain nature of their businesses.
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