Quick Take: Lobster Rolls & Visi Media

[Note: My Quick Takes are my personal commentaries and do not represent IWIRC Indonesia. I have moved in February 2025 to Acrostics Asia.]

By Eveline Danubrata

President Joko Widodo’s 29-year-old son, Kaesang Pangarep, is barred from running in November’s regional elections after Indonesia’s Elections Commission issued rules that upheld the minimum age of 30 for nominated candidates. While this may have prevented protests from escalating, Indonesians are still angry over the president’s dynastic ambitions.

Public attention has focused on Kaesang and his wife, Erina Gudono, who spent lavishly on a lobster roll, baby stroller and private jet during their trip to America while protests roiled at home. Erina posted an Instagram photo of a IDR 400,000 (USD 26) lobster roll, which is out of reach for ordinary Indonesians, drawing comparisons to Marie Antoinette (let them eat lobster rolls?). Even if their personal spending is personal, the optics doesn’t look good.

Turning to the credit scene, the Central Jakarta Commercial Court issued a second ruling that affirmed the rights of private credit lenders to vote in Visi Media Group’s local in-court restructuring (PKPU) proceedings. Before the Jakarta court’s decision, Visi Media’s PKPU administrators had tried to “disenfranchise” the voting rights of these lenders related to their USD 560 million claims, according to their legal advisor Kirkland & Ellis.

“This is a marked change from past cases in Indonesia where other international lenders and bondholders have seen their voting rights being disenfranchised in PKPU reorganization processes through similar tactics and arguments by insolvent Indonesian debtors,” Kirkland said in a press release dated 26 August.

One of the most infamous cases was Bakrie Telecom, whose bondholders were rejected when they tried to file claims against the onshore company undergoing PKPU, on the basis that they were creditors of the Singapore special purpose vehicle (SPV). This is a logic-bending argument because most of the bonds issued by offshore SPVs carry a guarantee from the parent company in Indonesia.

Bakrie Telecom’s tactics in 2015 had a ripple effect on other Indonesian borrowers. A lawyer friend who advises offshore bond issuers once grumbled that the risks section in bond prospectuses became quite a bit longer thanks to Bakrie Telecom.

Fast forward to the present and Visi Media—which is also a part of Indonesian conglomerate Bakrie Group—could be another notable chapter. Bloomberg reported that the media company proposed to delay the final repayment of its debt principal owed to the group of private credit funds by as long as 30 years.

It’s too early to tell how the Visi Media vote will turn out, but investors are closely watching the case to gauge whether Indonesian debtors will be allowed to stick to their old playbook.