An Expert in Asian Business Practices

Benny Simon Tabalujan, Associate Professor at Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, is an Indonesian Chinese who has been living in Melbourne since 2003, and he has done very well for himself, and apart from his part time professorship at Melbourne Uni certainly has an impressive resume:

• was an award-winning associate professor in business law at the Nanyang Business School, Singapore
• was a corporate and commercial lawyer with Minter Ellison and worked in Melbourne and Hong Kong
• consulted to a unit of international law firm Freehills (now Herbert Smith Freehills)

Apart from a PhD he also holds a Graduate Diploma in Divinity from the Australian College of Theology, and works part time as a pastor, or elder, at the Belmore Road Church of Christ in Melbourne’s Chinese heavy east.

And he is a published author of various books, book chapters, and journal articles, and one of his most important works is titled “Culture and Ethics in Asian Business“, in the Melbourne Review, 2008.

His name has come up as police in Jakarta, Indonesia, are very keen to speak with Benny over what they say is his involvement in “land mafia” activities, where Benny, Indonesian passport number P476797, is accused of having used various front companies, including PT Salve Veritate, PT Pactum Serva, PT Sapere Aude, and PT Sigma Dharma Utama, to deceive purchasers of property by falsifying land certificates. Police are said to be currently arranging to issue a “red notice”, through Interpol, in an attempt to get him back to Jakarta to answer for himself.

This could all be a great misunderstanding of course. Misunderstandings with property contracts can happen all the time, at least they can in south east Asian countries, where it is genuinely not clear who owns what, “legally”, sometimes, and determining things can occasionally come down to a matter of bribery.

However things may be in this instance as a nation we certainly do need more quality immigrants with real world expertise in Asian business practices, such as Benny. Non-ironically for a change, we are going to need to learn more about these interesting Asian business practices, if they are in this case genuinely interesting, if the Anglophone world continues its decline, and the Chinese and Chinese diaspora world continues its ascent.