Akbar Tandjung

Djandji Akbar Zahiruddin Tandjung (born 14 August 1945) is an Indonesian politician who served as the Speaker of the People's Representative Council from 1999 until 2004.

[1] Djandji Akbar Zahiruddin Tandjung was born on 14 August 1945 in Sorkam, North Sumatra during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies.

[5] In the late 1980s, when long-serving president Suharto started to more actively seek Muslim support, Akbar became deputy secretary general of Golkar.

[6] At the Golkar convention in December 2004, Akbar lost the party's chairmanship to Jusuf Kalla, at that time the country's vice president.

[7] The party ended up dropping Bakrie as its candidate and threw its weight behind Prabowo Subianto, with Akbar serving as one of his campaign advisers.

[8][9] In 2017, Akbar expressed concern that Golkar could lose legislative seats in Indonesia's 2019 elections because of a negative public perception of its chairman, Setya Novanto.

[11] In September 2002, Central Jakarta District Court sentenced Akbar to three years in prison for embezzling Rp 40 billion (about $4.8 million) in state funds that were supposed to have been spent on a 1999 food program for the poor.

After the ruling, a dissenting judge, Abdul Rahman Saleh, said Akbar had engaged in "corrupt practice" and was guilty of "shameful conduct because he failed to show minimal appropriate efforts to protect state money”.