(Second of two parts)
Part 1: An Indonesian billionaire wants EDC: The $5-B offer raising the stakes in the Lopez feud
The news this July that an Indonesian billionaire has offered US$5 billion for Energy Development Corporation (EDC) lands differently once the company’s history is laid out in full. EDC is not simply a large power producer that happens to be caught in the Lopez family’s governance war. It is an over 50-year experiment in what a country does about energy insecurity, an experiment that has passed through state ownership, a contested privatization, a debt crisis that cost the Lopezes their oldest utility, and a corporate rebuilding that turned it into one of the largest geothermal companies on Earth.
This piece traces that arc, because every question now being asked about the Barito offer, who decides, who benefits, what the country stands to lose, has an answer rooted somewhere in this history.
A child of the 1973 oil shock
