•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

The Ministry for Communications and Information Technology said on Tuesday it was planning to investigate telecommunications companies involved in business deals with Israel, a day after the minister said a company would be dropped from a tender because it had an Israeli shareholder.

“We will investigate the involvement of Israel-affiliated companies in the telecommunications industry, and we will sanction [local companies] if we find there are violations of regulations,” Gatot S Dewa Broto, a ministry spokesman, told the Jakarta Globe.

On Monday, Communications and Information Technology Minister Tifatul Sembiring said US-based company Amdocs would be excluded from bidding to supply a billing service to PT Telkom Selular Indonesia because it had an Israeli shareholder.

Tifatul, a member of the conservative Islamic Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), said excluding Amdocs was justified because Israel did not have diplomatic relations with Indonesia — something he claimed was required by a ministerial regulation on telecommunications.

Amdocs is headquartered in Chesterfield, Missouri and has branches around the world. It has an office in Tel Aviv, but the Jakarta Globe could not confirm whether it had Israeli shareholders.

Asked about Tifatul’s statement, Gatot said there was nothing in the telecommunications regulations that specifically prohibited a partnership with a business from a country that did not have formal relations with Indonesia. However, he said Tifatul was probably referring to a 1999 regulation on telecommunications that stated that the public interest must be protected.

“It is not directly stated in the regulation, but we interpret this to mean that the banning comes from an effort to protect the people’s interests,” Gatot said.

“It’s not because the minister is from the PKS,” he added.

Meanwhile, Maswidyantoro, an analyst from consumer organization Masyarakat Telematika Indonesia (Mastel), called Tifatul’s use of ministerial regulations “irrelevant” and unwise.

According to Maswidyantoro, Israeli technology was commonly used in the information-technology sector because the country was a major producer of high-tech components.

Currently, 90 percent of the telecommunication parts used in the country were imported, he said. Many of these could be from Israeli manufacturers or come from companies with Israeli shareholders, he said.

“How about products from Taiwan? Many of our telecommunications products are from Taiwan — another country that does not have diplomatic relations with Indonesia,” Maswidyantoro said.

Eddie Kurnia, a spokesman from PT Telkomunikasi Indonesia, the parent company of Telkom Selular, a provider of cellphone services, said the company was still investigating the issue.

However, Telkom would support the government regulations, he said.