The conversation has been part of Indonesian business lore for many years now. Foreign investor to Anthony Salim: Who owns Indofood? Salim: Me. Who owns Indocement? Me. Who owns Indomobil? Me. Who owns Indomilk? Me. Who owns Indonesia? That’s in the joint venture (between me and whoever is in the government).

It probably is an apocryphal story, but it captures two aspects of the Indonesian reality rather accurately. It shows how big and all-pervasive the Salim group’s presence is in the economic life of the world’s largest archipelagic nation with its territory spread over 17,508 islands.

And it captures the other facet of a typical oligarchy, where governments and business tycoons move hand in hand, making fair or foul deals.

But as he sits relaxed in the small hotel room, wearing a Javanese batik-printed cotton shirt and fielding questions on his business with remarkable ease and a smile, Salim seems to be the simplest of men ? far removed from the arrogant persona of the conversation. The owner of Indonesia’s biggest business empire and one of the southeast Asia’s richest men certainly carries his fame lightly.

By contrast, his cousin and sole partner, Benny Santosa, looks the typical businessman in his black suit and tie and polite but formal manners. Seated between them, West Bengal’s chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, epitomises the Bengali bhadralok ? genteel, transparent and trying hard to find his place in the world of big business.

The three sit there in a small couch watching a video presentation on the group’s wide-ranging businesses before the Salim-Bengal government agreement on the huge Kolkata International Economic Zone project. “Get over that quickly and that and that too,” Salim hurries his executives, appearing more like a participant than the boss.

All along, he takes questions from a group of journalists who have come all the way from Calcutta to Jakarta to witness Bengal’s new leader literally going global. “Stop there and show that in detail,” he interjects as the slides on the Batam Industrial Park (BIP) come alive on the screen. “This is the model for our Bengal project. But we’ll improve on it because Bengal has such a large pool of university graduates.”

The BIP near Singapore is a self-contained, high-tech development project, created at a cost of US$ 1 billion but whose annual exports average US$ 2 billion. More than 80 big foreign companies are represented among the investors ? 36 of them Japanese and 22 American. The city has living quarters, educational institutions, hospitals, shopping and recreational centres for the workers and a Batan Executive Village for business executives who can play golf and live a “comfortable” life to compensate for their jet-setting business schedules. “Bengal can actually better Batam,” he quips.

Bengal may be a fresh pasture but Salim’s family is no stranger to communists. It has been a long way for it from the time when Liem Sioe Liong, Anthony’s father and a Chinese Indonesian with the adopted name of Sudono Salim, built its fortune, thanks largely to his long-time friendship with President Suharto. But then it was a very different story. The Suharto regime in Indonesia that followed a CIA-backed ouster of Soekarno saw the killing of tens of thousands of communists. That was the time when Bhattacharjee, the young Marxist, joined rallies in Calcutta’s streets to protest the massacre of the Indonesian comrades.

Anthony Salim, however, has had no problem working with communists. His recent Asian ventures have taken him to Vietnam and China. Communist Calcutta could not be far behind. “I’m sure our Bengal project will do well with the blessing of His Excellency and our common vision,” he says, with a friendly pat on Bengal’s reformist leader’s shoulder. “The state and the private sector have to join hands for business,” he adds.

They did for Sudono Salim, now 92, in the Suharto era. The group’s rise began with the Bogasari Flour mill, the world’s largest. It has a monopoly of the import, milling and distribution of wheat in Indonesia and is the raw material supplier for Indofood, the world’s biggest instant noodles producer. Many of the group’s other businesses ?from shipping to banking and real estate ? flourished with Suharto’s patronage.

The post-Suharto era has seen the rise of other major business tycoons. One of them is the Bakhrie group, headed by Abu Rizal Bakhrie, who is now the country’s most powerful politician and the “coordinating minister” for the crucial portfolios of economy, finance and industry.

But even his critics admire Anthony Salim for his business acumen and unstoppable expansion plans. He ? and Santosa ? have taken the group to new heights and to new shores as far as China, West Asia and even Africa.

For all his fame and money, though, rumours about the group keep surfacing from time to time. What really is the group’s worth? And did it recover enough from the Asian currency crash of 1997? “We were hit badly, like everybody else. We sold a hundred of our companies. But we restructured, made money and bought back the companies,” Salim says. “As for the group’s turnover, you’d better ask Benny,” he adds, in evident good humour.

Part of the mystique about Salim obviously comes from his lifestyle. He is a jet-setting, new-age businessman, perennially acquiring stakes in companies at home and abroad. And both he and Santosa keep a very low public profile.

“It’s very difficult for the media to meet him, let alone interview him,” says a journalist at Indonesia’s leading English daily, The Jakarta Post.

Even Prasoon Mukherjee, the Jakarta-based Bengali entrepreneur who introduced the Salim group to Bengal and Bhattacharjee, knows little about the man’s personal life. Santosa, of course, knows him. But he would not talk about Salim’s personal traits. “He has only one passion ? business,” he remarks wryly.

But most people who have known him credit the 52-year-old man with a rare dynamism. Some say it has something to do with the family’s enormous capacity for adaptation. It is a rare family in Indonesia that has changed its religion thrice ? from Buddhism to Islam and then to Christianity.

Anthony Salim has all the credentials to be Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s man of all reforms.