Karen stays as Pertamina’s number one

The government has favored PT Pertamina president director Karen Agustiawan over the other directors of the company in a reshuffle that will be completed shortly.

“The president director will not be replaced,” State SOE Minister Mustafa Abubakar told reporters Wednesday, ending speculation that she might be removed over internal conflicts with other directors.

Mustafa refused to elaborate on the government’s reasons to retain Karen as the president director.

Karen Agustiawan, the first woman to lead the company, was appointed as Pertamina’s president director on Feb. 5, 2009.

Mustafa said the government would scrap the position of vice president director and reshuffle all the other director positions. Currently Pertamina’s vice president director position is held by Omar Sjawaldy Anwar.

Earlier, the government also scrapped the vice president director position at the state power firm PT PLN while appointing a fresh new president director, media mogul Dahlan Iskan, from outside the PLN inner circle.

“There is a tendency that without these vice president positions, state owned enterprises will move more energetically,” Mustafa said.

As for the other directors, Mustafa said the government was selecting seven new directors from among the 25 would-be candidates for the positions made vacant by the reshuffle. “Most of them are from internal Pertamina nominations,” he said. Mustafa added that the reshuffle was made to “prepare Pertamina in facing the [coming] challenges this year”.

“We need a new and stronger team to achieve better performance in 2010 which [will] offer us better economic opportunities,” he said.

Apart from the president director and present vice president director, Pertamina currently has five other directors for upstream, refining, marketing and trading, a financial director, a human resources director and a general affairs director.

A source said that the government would also add a new directorate to the Pertamina organization chart. The source added that the government actually had retained the names of the seven strongest candidates for the new positions, but was still completing the evaluating of two of them.

Mustafa said the government expected to announce the new directors and their positions before January 15.

Pertamina is the most profitable state-owned enterprise. Last year the firm paid over to the government dividends of Rp 13.08 trillion, equivalent to almost half of the total Rp 28.62 trillion in dividends paid to government by all state enterprises.

Given recent increases in crude oil prices, Pertamina expects to book profits of about Rp 17.7 trillion this year, up from the initially estimated figure for 2009 of Rp 15.3 trillion.

Source: Alfian and Nani Afrida , The Jakarta Post , Jakarta