The Best Western Heritage Hotel on Seminyak’s rather unattractive Sunset Road was filled with frowning bules this week for a “workshop and public forum” designed to quell rising fears amongst Bali’s expat community that the Indonesian government is planning a crackdown on foreign landholdings.
The forum was promoted as offering a “path forward” from the “nominee crisis”, but since no representatives of Indonesia’s new Jokowi government spoke or even attended, the several hundred expats who paid $10 to attend had to do make do with advice from a human rights lawyer and an academic, and hear the alarming story of a bule who is battling in court with a Balinese nominee who has allegedly threatened her with gang violence if she pursues the case.
None of this is new. Had I been there I could have regaled them with the story of how my 25-year leasehold was ripped up on a dodgy technicality a few years into it in the early 1990s. But I’m sure there was no shortage of stories like that. Then and now, if you think you hold land in Bali (or anywhere in Indonesia) through a local nominee, you’d better make sure you stay on the right side of the local, because you can’t win in court.
According to my fly on the wall, various speakers estimated that there was currently $US8.4 billion of foreign investment in Bali through the various forms of legal and quasi-legal leasehold, with 140 active cases of disputed land before the courts. “We were reminded that the nominee certificate is invalid,” my source said, “and that when these arrangements come to their attention, the National Lands Office is required to strike out the name of the nominee and the land goes to the state. Both parties lose. Quite a few of the people at the forum were quite frightened by this prospect.”