Bob Hasan

Mohamad "Bob" Hasan (born 1931) is an Indonesian businessman, former Minister of Trade and Industry, and friend of former president of Indonesia, Suharto. Hasan was convicted of corruption in 2001 in a widely publicised trial.

Hasan, who is of Chinese Indonesian descent and whose birth name is The Kian Seng (Chinese: 鄭建盛; pinyin: Zhèng Jiànshèng), was born in Semarang, Central Java, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in February 1931. He changed his name upon becoming a Muslim. He is a foster son of Gatot Subroto, a general in the Indonesian Army, who commanded then-Colonel Suharto in the 1950s, and through whom Hasan met Suharto.

After Suharto replaced Subroto as commander of the Army's Diponegoro Division, Hasan worked with Suharto to develop a wide range of side businesses, controlled by the military, that provided much of the funding for the Division as well as extra income for its officers.

After Suharto took the presidency in 1966, he initiated a massive expansion of Indonesian commercial logging, especially in the islands outside of Java. In the 1970s Hasan served as the required Indonesian "partner" for foreign companies wanting to harvest timber in Indonesia, working most notably with the United States corporation Georgia Pacific, and also established a number of joint ventures between his and government-owned companies. In 1981 the government banned the export of unmilled timber, leading to many foreign companies selling their Indonesian operations to domestic owners interested in establishing processing operations; Hasan, already a major shareholder in Georgia Pacific's Indonesia operation, became its sole owner when the company left Indonesia in 1983. Starting from timber, he expanded his business interests into financial, insurance, automotive, and other industries, primarily through his Kalimanis holding company. Hasan's Kalimanis group was reported to control over 2 million hectares (7,700 square miles) of prime concessions in Kalimantan.

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