Govt to speed up restructuring at Pertamina

State Minister of State Enterprises Soegiharto said on Thursday that the government would speed up the arduous process of restructuring work at state oil and gas company Pertamina, The Jakarta Post (website) and the Investor Daily Indonesia reported.

"This is not a new process but the United Indonesia Cabinet tries to facilitate the process so as to enable it to finish as soon as possible," Soegiharto said after a meeting with a number of other related ministers presided over by Vice President Jusuf Kalla.

Soegiharto said that the restructuring would not differentiate between core and non-core businesses, but rather which ones belonged to the upstream and downstream, distribution, processing, transportation and others.

He said that this would have something to do with inventory collection of Pertamina's assets before being announced to the public.

The process of inventory collection had been done, but its declaration had to be decided and announced by Minister of Finance Yusuf Anwar, before being ratified by Minister of Mining Resources and Energy Purnomo Yusgiantoro.

"The two ministers are still conducting checks and balances," Soegiharto said, adding that the government had to be careful in handling Pertamina as it was a highly strategic state-owned company.(*)