Hello and welcome to another podcast in our Best of Emlex series with me, David Plott.

Emlex's managing editor for Asia.

Today we're going to delve into an issue that's a scourge throughout this region,

bribery and corruption.

In this podcast, our focus is going to be on a bribery case from Indonesia.

It's a story that Emlex corruption

reporter Phoebe Sears broke back in 2016, and it's a story that's still ongoing a year later.

I'm here with Phoebe. Welcome to this Best of Emlex podcast, Phoebe. Thanks, David.

Phoebe, in reporting this story, you uncovered widespread bribery, bogus accounting, cover-ups,

and other wrongdoing.

Talk us through how the story unfolded.

Okay, so it starts with an Indonesian power company called Max Power, but it's also drawn

in foreign companies that are household names, the Standard Charter Bank in particular,

but also a Japanese conglomerate Mitsui, and American multinational General Electric.

Let's start with Standard Chartered. How did this global bank get involved with this local

power company? Things basically kicked off in 2012 when Standard Charter got a director appointed to MaxPal's board,

and it also injected more than $140 million into the business.

Standard Charter really bet on Max Power because just three years later, it actually became MaxPow's majority shareholder.

Tell us, how did that work?

So Standard Charter got that shareholding through its

private equity unit, and it wasn't long before that unit, Standard Chartered Private Equity,

appointed one of its own employees as Max Power's CEO, and after that, more Standard Chartered

...