President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo is expected to appoint a new cabinet on Wednesday, sources close to the matter said.
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Widodo met with a number of his cabinet ministers late on Tuesday at the palace but no announcement was made.
World Bank Managing Director Sri Mulyani is the new Finance Minister.
Six years later, she officially returned to Indonesia, wearing a blue batik outfit and a pearl necklace at a handover ceremony at the finance ministry in Jakarta.
The inclusion of Sri Mulyani’s name in Jokowi’s cabinet was immediately responded positively by the financial market.
Reuters reported that the Energy and Mining Minister Sudirman Said is expected to be among those replaced ministers in the second cabinet reshuffle in less than two years.
The country’s Central Statistics Agency has recorded economic growth in the first quarter of 2016 at 4.92 percent, lower than the government’s target of 5.2 percent.
The change in finance ministers comes just after Indonesia launched a tax amnesty it hopes will bring home billions of dollars that Indonesians have parked overseas.
Former Indonesian army general Wiranto will replace Luhut Pandjaitan as the chief security minister. His elevation will cause dismay to many in East Timor, where troops under the general’s command killed 1,400 people in a rampage of violence in 1999. The country formally became independent in 2002.
Gen. Wiranto was also publicly named as a suspect in the inquiry initiated in 1999 by Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia, Komnas HAM), but was never charged in Indonesia. “This is really bad news for human rights”.
A year on, analysts say this week’s reshuffle is likely to be politically motivated as Mr Joko seeks to consolidate support from parties that have been keen to join the ruling coalition.
Wiranto controls Hanura, “a party which has supported Jokowi from the get-go, and one way of seeing this is for the president to secure its continued support”, wrote Wellian Wiranto, economist at OCBC.
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Widodo, who became president after the October 2014 election, last reshuffled his cabinet in August 2015.
