Legislator: State-Owned Firms Must Be Clean And Transparent

Jakarta, Dec 11 (ANTARA) - State-owned companies must be clean and transparent if they want to be free from external intervention, a legislator said. "The main key for state-owned firms to reject external intervention and pressures is that they have to be clean and be transparent so that they will have nothing to be suspicious of," Ferrari Romawi of the House of Representatives (DPR)`s Commission VI on investment said here on Tuesday. Ferrari was one of the speakers at a national seminar on state firms and anti-corruption campaign organized by ANTARA National News Agency. The ruling Democratic Party legislator said that if state-owned companies were clean and transparent there would be no intervention or external pressures. However, if they are not, external intervention and pressure would take place. Therefore, he called on the management of state firms to manage the firms transparently. Because, he said, state firms collapsed due to corruption or inefficiency from inside. He said that corruption at state-owned companies is difficult to reveal because their assets are separated from the assets of the state, a legislator said. "I personally disagree with the idea that state companies` assets should be separated from those of the state because it causes difficulties to reveal corruption," he said. The ruling Democratic Party legislator said that the difficulty to reveal corruption cases in state-owned companies was because their assets were in grey areas. "It is difficult to find corruption at state-owned companies, except their inefficiency. Therefore, we need a common perception that state-owned firms` assets are state assets," he said. Thus, any corruption at a state company would be easy to trace because it could be known soon that there were state losses involved. This is because what are classified as corrupt deeds are actions that violated the law, caused state losses and personally enriched themselves or others.