The Three-Week-Old Monopoly: Prabowo’s Plan to Wall In Indonesia’s Export Dollars

The company that will soon control roughly a quarter of Indonesia’s export earnings did not exist three weeks before it was handed the job. PT Danantara Sumber Daya Indonesia — DSI — was incorporated on 18–19 May 2026.¹ On 20 May, President Prabowo Subianto told parliament that sales of palm oil, coal and ferroalloy would all have to run through a single state-appointed exporter.² The legal scaffolding, Government Regulation No. 24 of 2026, took effect on 1 June.³

Those three commodities are worth around US$65 billion a year between them — palm oil about $23bn, coal $26bn, ferroalloys $16bn — close to 23% of everything Indonesia sells abroad.¹ Routing all of it through one new entity is being sold as a fix for under-invoicing and lost revenue. That is part of the story. The larger part is sitting on Bank Indonesia’s balance sheet.

It also fits a pattern. Much of the unease about Indonesia under Prabowo Subianto — the kind that has turned a former investor favourite into a source of worry — comes down to a single instinct: the state wants its hands on the flow of money. Rules forcing exporters to keep their earnings in domestic banks, the steady expansion of the sovereign wealth fund Danantara, and now a gate that every commodity shipment has to pass through are all versions of the same move. The single-gate export regime is the most concrete instance of it — not a mood, but a mechanism. It is worth looking at how the machinery actually works.

Contents

• The currency problem behind the policy
• A company three weeks old
• The leakage it is meant to plug
• Where the rent gets captured
• Monopoly risk and a Soeharto-era echo
• What Singapore is watching
• Sources

The currency problem behind the policy

The rupiah has been sliding all year, and the central bank has been spending reserves to slow it down. Foreign exchange reserves fell from US$156.5bn at the end of December 2025 to US$144.9bn at the end of May 2026, the lowest level since June 2024.⁴ Most of that drawdown went on intervention and external debt repayment. By early June the rupiah was trading around 18,150 to the dollar, with at least one trader forecasting 19,000 by the end of the month.⁵

Month-end 2026	FX reserves (US$bn)
December 2025	156.5
January	154.6
February	151.9
March	148.2
April	146.2
May	144.9

This is the context the export regime is built for. For an economy this dependent on commodity dollars, every export receipt that stays onshore is a dollar the central bank does not have to find. Jakarta has been tightening the rules on where those receipts live for more than a year. Natural-resource exporters were already required to park their proceeds in domestic state banks and hold them for a stretch rather than keep them offshore; in 2026 the screw turned further, with officials moving exporters toward keeping the full value of their earnings in Indonesian state banks.⁶ The single-gate regime is the next mechanism in that sequence. If every shipment clears through a state company, the state sees the price, the buyer and the money — and the dollars are far harder to leave abroad.

A company three weeks old

DSI is not a ministry or an established trading house. It is a fresh subsidiary of the sovereign wealth fund Danantara, with Danantara Investment Management as its main shareholder.⁷ Its president director is Luke Thomas Mahony, an Australian who previously held senior technical roles at PT Vale Indonesia and inside Danantara itself; the president commissioner is Harold Jonathan Dharma, formerly of Mandiri Sekuritas.⁸ Putting a career mining professional rather than a political appointee at the top is a reasonable signal on competence. It does not change the more basic fact that a brand-new company is being given a legal monopoly over $65bn of trade.

Under the regulation, the strategic commodities may only be exported by the designated state firm, either as owner of the goods or as sole intermediary, and the export firm sets the selling price.³ The rollout is staged. Through the transition — from 1 June to the end of 2026 — private exporters keep shipping under existing contracts while reporting to DSI, which validates volume, pricing and delivery. From 1 January 2027 the strategic commodities can move only through DSI, which is meant to take over contracts, payments and shipping.³ Officials have hinted full control could arrive as early as September 2026 if the handover goes smoothly.⁹ The Ministry of Trade has issued three implementing regulations — one each for coal, palm oil and ferroalloy — to fill in the mechanics.¹⁰

The leakage it is meant to plug

The official rationale is real and large. The government leans on an estimate, drawn from UN and World Bank trade data, that Indonesia may have lost as much as US$908bn in foreign-exchange earnings between 1991 and 2024 through export manipulation — under-invoicing and transfer pricing.¹¹ The mechanism is familiar across commodity economies: a producer sells to a related party at an artificially low declared price, the goods are resold abroad at the true price, and the difference accrues offshore, beyond the reach of the tax authority and the central bank.

This is where Singapore enters the story, and not in the way the rumour mill suggests. Industry reporting notes that some Indonesian export transactions have been routed through affiliated companies in Singapore before being resold onward at higher prices.¹² Singapore is not the villain here — it is the convenient booking location that a single-gate system is designed to render pointless. If DSI sees and prices every shipment, the affiliate-in-Singapore step loses its purpose. That is the genuine, defensible core of the policy.

Where the rent gets captured

The catch is in how DSI makes its money. During the transition it charges nothing and acts as a documentation and oversight layer rather than a trader.⁹ But the regulation explicitly lets the export firm set a margin “within reasonable limits,” and Danantara’s chief executive, Rosan Roeslani, has indicated DSI will ultimately operate as a commercial intermediary — buying from producers, selling to foreign buyers, and capturing the spread.¹ The difference between those two designs is the whole argument. A pure transparency gate that takes no cut plugs leakage at little cost to producers. A commercial monopoly that sets both the price and its own margin becomes a toll booth on a quarter of the country’s exports — and the size of that toll is, for now, discretionary.

This is the single most important number that does not yet exist. Until the margin is fixed and disclosed, every producer in coal, palm oil and ferroalloy is being asked to route their sales through an entity that can, in principle, decide how much of their revenue to keep. Markets have priced the uncertainty accordingly, weighing the policy against the weakest reserves in two years and unresolved questions about how Danantara itself is funded.⁷

Monopoly risk and a Soeharto-era echo

Concentrating $65bn of trade in one channel carries two distinct risks, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is incompetence: a young organisation taking over the contracts, logistics and payments for the world’s largest thermal coal and palm oil exporters has limited room for error before shipments stall and buyers look elsewhere. Business groups have asked for a slower, more phased handover for exactly this reason, warning of disruption, lost competitiveness and monopoly effects.¹³ One observer’s framing captured the worry neatly: design DSI as a transparent marketing facility, not a new bottleneck.¹²

The second risk is competence in the wrong direction. Indonesia has run state commodity monopolies before. The clove-marketing board of the early 1990s, which forced farmers to sell to a single politically connected buyer at a set price, is the cautionary case every analyst reaches for and then carefully declines to name in official settings. A single buyer that sets the purchase price, the export price and its own margin is structurally the same animal, whatever the stated intent. Whether DSI becomes a leakage plug or simply relocates the leakage — from offshore affiliates to a domestic gatekeeper — depends entirely on how transparently that margin is governed.

What Singapore is watching

Singapore has been measured in public. After a bilateral economic meeting in Jakarta on 9 June, Deputy Prime Minister and Trade Minister Gan Kim Yong said every country sets its own export priorities, and that Singapore would work with Indonesia to keep it an attractive destination for investment.¹⁴ The restraint is unsurprising given the stakes: Singapore has been Indonesia’s largest source of foreign direct investment since 2014, and Indonesia is among Singapore’s top trading partners.¹⁵ Neither side gains from a public fight.

The quieter tension is the transfer-pricing link. A policy whose stated purpose includes closing down mispriced sales booked through Singapore affiliates is, by design, aimed at flows that have long passed through the city-state. Singapore’s interest is less in defending those structures than in making sure the replacement system is predictable enough that legitimate trade and financing keep moving. That is the substance behind the diplomatic language about supply-chain resilience.

Strip away the noise about anti-corruption purges and the policy resolves into something simpler and more interesting: a foreign-exchange defence dressed as trade governance. Faced with a falling rupiah and shrinking reserves, Jakarta is trying to wall in export dollars by forcing them through a channel it controls. The under-invoicing case is genuine; the FX logic is coherent; the execution is being attempted by a company that is barely a month old. The bet is that consolidating export rents in state hands defends the currency and recovers lost revenue. The risk is that a new monopoly with a discretionary margin becomes its own form of leakage — one with a Jakarta address rather than a Singapore one. The number that will decide which it is has not been published yet.

Sources

• Budi Ryan, “Indonesia’s New Export Policy,” Recompound (blog.recompound.id) — export values, DSI incorporation date, margin/trader confirmation.
• “Prabowo Orders Coal and Palm Oil Exports Through State Firms,” Tempo English (en.tempo.co).
• “Aturan Ekspor Satu Pintu Terbit: BUMN Tentukan Harga & Margin,” Detik Finance (finance.detik.com); “Prabowo Rilis PP Tata Kelola Ekspor,” CNN Indonesia (cnnindonesia.com).
• “BI Forex Reserves Hit 2-Year Low,” Indonesia Investments (indonesia-investments.com); Bank Indonesia monthly reserve data.
• “Indonesia’s Foreign Exchange Reserves Fall as Rupiah Weakens,” Tempo English (en.tempo.co).
• “Indonesia to bring commodity exports under centralised control,” Reuters via Investing.com; “Indonesian government to tighten export-receipt rules,” Asia News Network (asianews.network).
• “Palm Oil and Coal Sectors Fear Fallout From Indonesia’s New Export Regime,” Jakarta Globe (jakartaglobe.id).
• “Danantara CEO Confirms Luke Thomas as DSI President Director,” Tempo English (en.tempo.co); “What We Know So Far About Danantara Sumberdaya Indonesia,” Jakarta Globe (jakartaglobe.id).
• “Indonesia centralizes strategic commodity exports under Danantara,” Crypto Briefing (cryptobriefing.com).
• “Indonesia’s Ministry of Trade Issues Three Regulations,” Palm Oil Magazine (palmoilmagazine.com); Agricom (agricom.id).
• “Perilous logic behind Indonesia’s commodity export funnel,” Asia Times (asiatimes.com).
• “One-Gate Export System and a New House Called Danantara,” Palm Oil Magazine (palmoilmagazine.com).
• “Indonesian Exporters Call for Phased Implementation of Single-Gate Export Policy,” ChemAnalyst (chemanalyst.com).
• “Singapore Responds to Indonesia’s One-Door Export,” Tempo English (en.tempo.co); “Singapore backs continued investment ties,” The Online Citizen (theonlinecitizen.com).
• “Top Investor Singapore to Work with Indonesia on One-Gate Export,” Jakarta Globe (jakartaglobe.id).