Corporate Governance And Political Connections On Wealth Expropriation Among Indonesian Business Groups

A decade after the 1997/98 Asian Financial crisis, Indonesia is still experiencing a low score on the effectiveness of corporate governance enforcement. The problem of wealth expropriation still persists due to high ownership concentration, domination of business groups and predominantly family-controlled firms. The overall objective of this study is to examine the role of corporate governance mechanisms and political connections to explain the extent of wealth expropriation through related party transactions. Related party transactions serves as a proxy for wealth expropriation and is examined from related lending, related borrowing, related party sales and related party purchases perspectives. The sample of this study was 127 public listed companies in the Indonesian Stock Exchange during the period of 1999-2008, resulted in 1270 firm-year observations. Dynamic panel data regression was used to test the hypotheses. The results of this study show that several internal governance mechanisms fail to discharge their monitoring role to wealth expropriation. Ultimate ownership structures and multiple directorships are more likely to support wealth expropriation. Director compensation and multiple commissionerships fail to act as effective monitoring mechanisms to curb wealth expropriation. Political connections tends to facilitate wealth expropriation and also acts as an impediment to the effectiveness of internal governance mechanisms. This research highlighted several contributions