James Riady is one of the most popular and richest Businessman who was born on January 7, 1957 in Jakarta, Indonesia. He co-founded AcrossAsia Multimedia Ltd. with Jim Guy Tucker. Tucker was another Arkansas governor who had to leave the governor’s mansion due to fraud in the Whitewater scandal. They met at Little Rock’s Second Presbyterian Church. They wanted to create the largest Indonesian cable TV network using AcrossAsia Multimedia. It was a failure.
Since converting to Christianity in 1990, Riady has been an avid evangelical. He has established foundations, charities and Christian-inspired schools to spread the message in Muslim-majority Indonesia. Inevitably, his zeal has clashed with conservative Muslim elements in the country. On 23 July 2001, Fortune published an interview in which he espoused his vision of converting poor villages to Christianity.
In 2008, Riady’s close business associate Billy Sindoro, an executive of Riady’s Jakarta-based First Media, was filmed handing bribes to officials of Indonesia’s anti-monopoly agency, the KPPU. Riady and First Media were then in a business dispute with a Malaysian company and the KPPU was deliberating that dispute. Sindoro was later found guilty of corruption. 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’s business career has been marked by corruption scandals. James Riady contributed heavily to the Democratic Party’s 1996 presidential campaign. The United States Senate investigated the financial scandal surrounding the 1996 U.S. Presidential campaign. James Riady was charged and pleaded guilty for campaign finance violations committed by his own corporation and himself. For contributing foreign funds to Democratic Party, Riady was sentenced to 8.6 million U.S. dollars. This is the largest ever fine in a case involving campaign finance.
Riady made his way into the American business community in 1977 when he was convinced by Arkansas banking moguls W. R. Witt, Jackson T. Stephens and the founders of Stephens Inc. (one of America’s most prominent investment banks) to become partners in Stephens’s Worthen Banking Corporation. This was after Riady’s father Mochtar Riady sent him to establish a bank presence in the United States. Mochtar Riady also wanted to help Jimmy Carter’s former budget chief, Bert Lance, with the sale of stock he had in the National Bank of Georgia. However, the deal did not materialize. The Riadys met Bill Clinton, the former governor of Arkansas, through their interactions with Stephens Inc. James and his father signed an agreement with Zenith Electronics in the 1980s to produce color television sets for Indonesia. They also built a large production facility near Jakarta. In 1985, Worthen was accused of facilitating illegal preferential loans of several million dollars to Riady-owned companies. These loans were allegedly channeled through Lippo Finance and Investment (the Riadys’ Little Rock-based business founded in 1983), as well as the Stephenses and Liem Swi Liong, another Chinese Indo-Indonesian businessman sometimes described as Mochtar’s mentor.
Together with Jim Guy Tucker he established a company called AcrossAsia Multimedia Ltd. Tucker, another former Arkansas governor, had been forced to vacate the governor’s mansion in 1996 due to alleged fraud in the Whitewater scandal. The two had met through Little Rock’s Second Presbyterian Church. With AcrossAsia Multimedia they wanted to build the largest cable TV infrastructure in Indonesia using a company called Kabelvision. The venture was unsuccessful.
