Mochtar Riady was also interested in helping Jimmy Carter's former budget director, Bert Lance, sell stock he held in the National Bank of Georgia, though the deal never materialized.

In the early 1980s James and his father signed a licensing agreement with Zenith Electronics to produce color television sets in Indonesia and built a large production plant near Jakarta.

Later, in 1985, Worthen was indicted of having administered several million dollars' worth of illegal, preferential loans to companies owned by the Riadys.

The loans had allegedly been channeled through Lippo Finance and Investment, the Riadys' Little Rock-based company established in 1983, as well as the Stephenses and Liem Swie Liong, another Chinese-Indonesian businessman, sometimes described as having been Mochtar's mentor.

James Riady moved to Los Angeles and established Lippo Bank with the help of Taiwanese banker John Huang.

With AcrossAsia Multimedia they wanted to build the largest cable TV infrastructure in Indonesia using a company called Kabelvision.

The Riady family recently acquired the tallest skyscraper in the western US, Los Angeles' US Bank Tower, for $367.5M through OUE, a Singapore-listed entity that it controls.

In December 2008, the Riady-owned Jakarta Globe published a sympathetic portrait of Sindoro in prison where he lamented he would not be able to spend Christmas with his family.

Riady received a waiver from a rule that forbids entry to foreigners guilty of "a crime involving moral turpitude," a term that government lawyers generally interpret to include fraud.

[citation needed] Part of his collection is displayed at the UPH Painting Museum on the 3rd floor of Matahari Towers in Lippo Karawaci.

It has more than 700 paintings by prominent national and international painters including Raden Saleh, Affandi, A. Sudjono, Barli, Wakidi, A.D. Pirous, Widayat, Zaini, Srihadi Soedarsono, Agus Djaya, Trubus, Mochtar Apin, Sudjana Kerton, Ivan Sagito, But Mochtar, Hendra Gunawan, Dede Eri Supria, Nasiah Djamin, Walter Spies, R. Bommet, Willem Dooijewaard and J.D.