In the summer of 1998, just after the fall of President Suharto, the United States Treasury detected some odd movements of large sums of money, allegedly $9 billion, to a bank in Austria. The money was his. Or rather it was a small part of the billions he was said to have screwed out of Indonesia between 1966 and 1998, when he had held absolute power there. At one point Mr Suharto was the sixth-richest person in the world. Indonesia-though he had modernised this sprawling mass of archipelagoes and islands, paved it, brought foreign investors in and promoted an economic boom-was the poorer.
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