NEW FINANCIAL SERVICE AUTHORITY TO OPERATE NEXT MONTH

By Andi Abdussalam

Jakarta, Dec 28 (ANTARA)  - The newly established Financial Service Authority (OJK), which will take over the task of the Capital Market and Financial Institutions Supervisory Agency (Bapepam-LK) will begin operations in January 2013.          Established based on Law No. 21/2011, the OJK --whose board of commissioners was installed last July-- will become an independent body and report to the House of Representatives. It will oversee banks, capital markets and non-banking financial institutions.          "Human resources, organization structure and governing rules have all been prepared. We hope the launch of the OJK operation early next year would be smooth," Muliaman D Hadad, the OJK chief commissioner, said on Tuesday.          In carrying out its duties, the board of commissioners of the OJK will be assisted by 13 deputies. Each commissioner will be assisted by several deputies and a working unit. The OJK has appointed 1,018 employees of whom 82 from Bank Indonesia (BI/the central banks) and 936 from the ministry of finance.          The House of Representatives (DPR) has approved a budget for the OJK amounting to Rp1.69 trillion in 2013. Besides, the OJK will also set up supporting committees when it is already operating.         "We have set up audit and ethics committees and are going to establish other committees regarding policies, governance, sharia finance and others. For this, we will ask for inputs from various sides and experts," Muliaman said.          In order to implement its duty next month, the OJK received on Friday state assets formerly under the Bapepam-LK.          The Finance Ministry, through the Capital Market and Financial Institution Supervision Agency (Bapepam-LK), transferred the state assets, which included an office, some vehicles and other properties of Bapepam-LK, to the Financial Services Authority.          "Based on the provisions contained in OJK law, the finance ministry -- in this case, the Bapepam-LK -- should transfer the assets to the OJK. And the OJK will use these assets while carrying out its duties in the future," said Rahmat Waluyanto, the deputy chairman of the board of commissioners of OJK, here on Friday.          The Finance Ministry and the newly established OJK on the same day signed a document on the transfer of the assets. Rahmat said the transferred assets included documents used in the supervision of financial institutions.          The value of the state assets transferred to the OJK totaled Rp337 billion, consisting  of 14,720 units of buildings, vehicles, office equipment, intangible assets and other forms of items belonging to the state.          "The transferred assets also include 21 kinds of documents, including 67,818 bundles, 409 compact discs, 15,224 database records and 109 electronic files," Rahmat stated.          With the transfer of the assets, the OJK is expected to begin the implementation of its tasks from next year onwards.          The new institution will supervise the performance of non-banking financial institutions and banks from January 1, 2013, and January 1, 2014, respectively.          With its establishment, OJK hopes that the Indonesian capital market would be able to increase its performance in keeping with the developments of the Indonesian economy which is growing well.          "We hope that the country's capital market would perform better in line with better Indonesian economic growth," Mulyaman D Hadad said in a discussion on the capital market on Friday.           Under its supervision, the OJK hopes that the capital market would develop further its business so that in the future it would contribute more to the country's economic growth. Therefore, the OJK expressed its commitment to allocating more time for supervising the capital in Indonesia.          "A good industry which is not under supervision would become bad. This is a challenge how to supervise it," asserted Muliaman.          For this, Muliaman said that his agency must have qualified employees who are not only professional but also have high integrity, morality and good characters to face all challenges in the field of financial industry supervision.          He said that the OJK is a new organization established to increase supervision on financial service industry through a good methodology which was expected to provide a good education to the people.          To that end, the OKJ chief commissioner expressed hope that the agency's employees should work hard to achieve the aim of the agency in creating a transparent financial market with a good integrity.          "The main tasks of the OJK are clear, namely give something new and better results than what have been achieved so far. Hopefully, good cooperation within the agency would create the aims to response the people's expectation," he said.         He said his side would continue to pay attention to the need of stock exchanges for better developments, particularly with regard to infrastructure, educational  and socialfacilities. However, he said, capital market authorities such as the Indonesian Stocks Exchange (BEI), the Indonesian Security Custodian Center (KSEI) and the Indonesian Security Underwriter Clearing Board(KPEI) would also continue to improve their quality through their programs.          "We have to be convinced that financial industry, capital market in particular, provides a significant contribution to the country's economic growth," he said.***2*** (T.A014/A/b003/B003) (T.A014/A/KR-BSR/B003) 28-12-2012 20:05: