House to summon Pertamina chief over tanker sales

The Commission IX of the House of Representatives (DPR) will soon summon the president of state owned oil and gas company PT Pertamina, Ariffi Nawawi, over the company's plan to sell two giant oil tankers now being built at one of South Korea's shipbuilding companies, Kompas reported Saturday.

The chairman of the House's Commission IX, Emir Moeis, said in Jakarta on Friday that the Commission's members wanted to get first-hand information related to the planned sales of Pertamina's two giant tankers, each designed with a capacity of 260,000 dead weight tonnage (DWT).

He acknowledged that some members of the Houses were worried that the planned sales of the tankers could involve corruption because profits to be raised from the sales would be much smaller compared to the long-term cost that have to be born by Pertamina to rent a tanker of the same capacity.

Pertamina earlier said that it planned to sell two giant tankers now being built in South Korea because the operation of the two tankers would much more costly than if the company leased them.

Pertamina's chief said that the operational cost of each tanker would reach US$45,000 per day, much lower than leasing cost for the same size of tanker, which would be only around $20,000 per day.

But Emir said that based on the House's sources, the leasing cost of the 260,000 DWT tanker had now reached $97,000 per day. "The $20,000 leasing cost (as told by Pertamina's boss) is actually for a tanker with a capacity of 40,000 DWT," he said. (*)