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Few investment bankers dominate one market as much as Credit Suisse's Helman Sitohang does Indonesia. With other banks sensing opportunities, can his connections keep the bank ahead of the game?
Mention the name Aburizal Bakrie in the smart bars, clubs and restaurants of Singapore and Jakarta where bankers gather and the name Helman Sitohang is often uttered in the next breath.
Sitohang is Credit Suisse's chief rainmaker in Jakarta and Singapore, a man regarded by many as perhaps the best-connected banker in Indonesia. Some of his envious colleagues even say he almost enjoys a father-son relationship with Bakrie, one of Indonesia's richest - and most powerfully connected - businessmen.
Throughout the last 14 years, when most foreign banks, still bearing wounds from the late 1990s, wouldn't touch an Indonesia deal, Credit Suisse kept its door open in Jakarta and its Rolodex up to date. That was mostly down to Sitohang, rewarded for his efforts as co-head of Credit Suisse's Asia-Pacific investment banking operation.
Sitohang's Bakrie relationship has served him and Credit Suisse well, but it's not been without its sleepless nights. As Indonesia's highest-profile Muslim pribumi, or indigenous, business family, the Bakries have been something of a protected species in mostly Islamic Indonesia, where the business elite tends to be ethnic Chinese. Politically-wired Bakrie has been close to the wall several times, only to be bailed out or have his obligations waived in controversial deals stitched up behind official Jakarta's secretive walls.
Shares in Bakrie's main operating company Bumi Resources have fallen to a three-year low as the market frets about its ability to service around $4 billion in debt, most notably a pressing $1.3 billion obligation to Beijing's state-owned China Investment Corp.
Bumi Resources' coal reserves, gathered mostly in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, are the mainstay of London-listed Bumi plc, which Bakrie co-owns with financier Nat Rothschild, a deal Sitohang helped set up through 2010/11.
But it's a relationship that has often had tensions, sometimes breaking out into open warfare between the two sides as they publicly traded barbs over Bumi Resources management and debt levels. Adding to the drama is the sharp fall in coal prices in the last year, and the slowing of the Chinese economy - Bumi's main customer.