The tawdry saga of Tommy Suharto’s Lilybank Lodge (in the Mackenzie Country) has engrossed Watchdog readers, and the wider public, for a decade now. Things went pear shaped for the murderous and corrupt Suharto dictatorship in 1998 when the more than three decades of terror and kleptocracy were ended by a popular uprising. Tommy, the most high profile of the billionaire Suharto children, decided he had more pressing priorities and sold Lilybank for the very reasonable sum of $1 to his Singaporean business partner, Alan Poh.

Funnily enough, this 1999 sale raised enormous suspicion that it was simply a manoeuvre to park Lilybank with a trusted mate, to put the asset out of reach of Indonesian and New Zealand investigators (rather as our shonky businessmen are prone to putting their assets into the names of their wives or even their Dear Old Mums, to dodge their creditors). The media and leading politicians shared our suspicions about this. At the end of 2000 it was reported that Lilybank had been sold to unidentified North Americans, for several million dollars. Subsequent inquiries with the resort’s lawyer established that the sale had, in fact, fallen through.

In early 2002 it was being marketed online for $7.2 million plus GST (the original asking price had been $9 million). In April 2002 it was reported to have been sold for an undisclosed price, to an unidentified "Auckland-based property developer" (Press, 20/4/02). However that sale must also have fallen through, because there was no change in Lilybank’s ownership. It remained in the hands of Alan Poh, the $1 man. And by July it was being advertised on the Internet again, for $6-7 million.

Finally, in August 2002, a real sale was announced. For an undisclosed price, Lilybank was sold to Dennis Thompson and his partner Sharon Bartlett, described as "millionaire property investors from Christchurch" (Press, 29/8/02). As a longtime Addington resident I note, with interest, that her extensive property portfolio (she is a director and shareholder in 42 companies, in addition to the newly created Lilybank Station Ltd) includes the controlling interest in Addington Shopping Centre Ltd. What Thompson and Bartlett intend to do with the luxury Lilybank Lodge (whose $1100 per night rooms have been empty for almost two years now) has not yet been announced.

Did the millions that changed hands find their way into one of the numerous secret bank accounts and front companies of Tommy Suharto? Unfortunately we have no way of finding that out. Maybe we will in the future. We’ve learned to be patient with this story. There was one further consequence of the sale – it flushed out the wonderful Gerard Olde-Olthof, the long time Lilybank manager. Watchdog has been featuring him in our Lilybank coverage throughout the past decade (most recently in number 100, August 2002), and the mainstream media found him irresistible also – because of his consistently outrageous behaviour. He was our secret weapon, in the late 1990s, in swinging public opinion and the media so decisively against Tommy and the whole Suharto presence in New Zealand. We reported that he’d disappeared from public view, at the time of the 1999 $1 sale of Lilybank. The Press report of the August 2002 sale described him as the "Wanaka-based managing director of Mr Poh’s company Deer Farming South Island Ltd" (29/8/02). He was in vintage form. Upon being rung and asked how much Lilybank had been sold for, he replied "I consider your phone calls a threat. Just leave it, OK" and hung up (ibid.).

Watchdog 99 (April 2002) analysed, at length, the Overseas Investment Commission’s (OIC) file on Lilybank, which we had requested under the Official Information Act. "Complete", as in, whole swathes of material were withheld from the file released to us (standard practice for the OIC). We appealed those deletions and the Chief Ombudsman, Sir Brian Elwood, delivered his verdict in a letter dated August 30, 2002. This nine page decision document upheld the OIC’s position (also standard practice in our long history of appealing OIC deletions to the Ombudsman). The OIC had, at his prompting, released some further, tiny and inconsequential, scraps from the file – literally, a sentence or even one or two words (such as the name of the OIC’s law firm, which was previously a State secret). But we’ll never know what else was withheld from the Lilybank file. Deletions were made on topics such as the "good character" checks carried out on Alan Poh at the time of the 1999 sale (none were ever carried out on Tommy, because there was no such requirement at the time he originally bought Lilybank), and on anything to do with the mystery submission, made by a third party, at the time of that 1999 sale (the submitter was never identified, and the submission was deleted in its entirety).

What about Tommy? He has other things on his mind right now. In 2000 he became the first and only member of the Suhartos to ever be convicted of anything and was sentenced to 18 months prison for a multi-million dollar land scam. He was having none of that and promptly shot through. Ironically, whilst he was underground, he was acquitted on appeal, a decision that shocked (but didn’t surprise) the nation and the world. Tommy was a busy boy during his more than a year on the run – the then President Habibie named him as responsible for a series of terrorist bombings that killed scores of people. Plus he was accused of procuring the murder of the judge who had sentenced him to prison. In late 2001 Tommy was recaptured and finally went to prison (where his conditions were befitting the billionaire son of the former dictator). He was charged with arranging the murder of the judge, fleeing from justice and possessing illegal rifles, handguns, grenades and explosives. He went on trial in 2002.

"But Tommy’s four month trial sometimes veered into farce. At one point his lawyer was accused of bribing witnesses in the trial and had to spend two weeks in jail. Tommy himself was brash and sarcastic throughout, calling in sick on several occasions and boasting at one point that he stayed out of jail through ‘coordination with law enforcers’. But (in July 2002), the judges in Jakarta proved that reformasi was still alive by ruling that Tommy had masterminded (Judge) Syafiuddin’s killing, paid $US11,000 to two gunmen and loaned them one of his own pistols to use in the attack (those two were convicted of murder in February 2002 and are serving life sentences)…(On the day of sentencing his lawyers) insisted their client’s stomach cramps and headache had kept him in his comfortable, air conditioned cell – outfitted with a television and a stereo system – and away from the Jakarta courtroom….Such was the reputation of Tommy, 40, youngest son of former Indonesian President Suharto, that observers in the packed, tropical courtroom thought that malingering might actually set him free. They were wrong, as they discovered when the court declared the absent Tommy guilty on all four charges and sentenced him to 15 years in prison.

"…The sentence handed down is considerably softer than the life terms being served by his henchmen. ‘According to any legal logic’, says Frans Hendra Winata, a Jakarta-based legal expert, ‘the mastermind behind the killings has to get a heavier verdict than the executioners’. The court explained its decision with a list of mitigating factors: that Tommy had been depressed, had a family to support, that he was young and was capable of reform…’From a legal point of view, this is good’, says Todung Mulya Lubis, a prominent Jakarta attorney. ‘No one ever imagined in the past that someone like Tommy Suharto could be convicted’" (Time, 5/8/02; "Throwing the Book at a Suharto").

Interestingly he did not appeal his convictions or sentence – maybe he knew not to push his luck. There was one consolation for Tommy – although he had been named by the then President Habibie as being responsible for the string of deadly bombings committed whilst he was on the run, he was never charged with any of them. Currently, those terrorist crimes look set to be pinned on the shadowy Islamic militants held responsible for (but not actually charged with) the murderous October 2002 Bali bombings.

Tommy’s transformation into a convicted murderer ended the dolce vita for him (and not a moment too soon). In August 2002 he was flown, by helicopter, from his comfy Jakarta cell to a run of the mill prison island, to serve his 15 year sentence. Authorities promised that he would get no special treatment there. He will have an old family mate for a companion – Bob Hasan, the leading crony and golf companion of former President Suharto. Hasan became a timber tycoon during the Suharto dictatorship (think of massive tropical rainforest despoilation and the choking clouds of smoke that plague South East Asia arising from huge scale Indonesian forest burnoffs – that’s Hasan’s legacy). He is serving a six year sentence for corruption, the highest profile Suharto crony to be imprisoned. His biggest gripe is that, as Suharto’s appointee to be Indonesia’s delegate to the International Olympic Committee, he wasn’t allowed out of prison to attend the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Obviously he needs to have Jeffrey Archer as a cellmate to get some tips on how to have privileged treatment in prison.

"On Bali an estimated 80,000 people, or roughly 5% of the population, were killed. ‘The populations of whole villages were executed, the victims either shot with automatic weapons or hacked to death with knives and machetes. Some of the killers were said to have drunk the blood of their victims or to have gloated over the numbers of people they had put to death’ (‘The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali’ by Geoffrey Robinson, Cornell University Press, 1995, p1). In chapter 11 of his profound, in-depth study on Bali, Robinson goes into some detail as to extent and nature of US involvement in the massacres. His overall assessment is that: ‘Even if it is not possible to establish definitively the extent of US complicity, it can be demonstrated that US policy contributed substantially to the seizure of power by the military under Suharto and to the massacre that ensued’ (ibid., p282). As he emphasises, at least as early as 1957, US policy initiatives had been deliberately exploiting and encouraging ‘internal political cleavages in Indonesia with the intention of bringing down the established government’ (ibid.).

On Bali, it was the arrival of the military with death lists and logistical support that mobilised the slaughter on a large scale. There was an orchestrated propaganda campaign to both instigate and legitimate the killings of those defined as the enemy. The Western-created myth of exotic Bali as a marvellously peaceful island so appropriate as a tourist Mecca masks a violent tradition, and Bali's part in the 1965-66 genocide was actually not quite the aberration it might seem". Other reports put the Balinese death toll as even higher: "On Bali, between 100,000 and 200,000 people are estimated to have died. ‘In Java, we had to egg them on to kill Communists; in Bali we had to restrain them’, an Indonesian general commented" (Press, 19/10/02; "’The violent world has trampled over paradise’", Christopher Moore).