Bakrie Paints Maldives Jaunt With 2 Actresses as Research Trip
Golkar presidential candidate Aburizal Bakrie hugs an oversize bear while on a trip to the Maldives.
Jakarta. A video clearly intended to embarrass Aburizal Bakrie emerged on the internet on Thursday showing the Golkar Party presidential candidate jetting off to the Maldives with a lawmaker and two actresses.
Sisters Marcella and Olivia Zalianty — familiar faces on the Indonesian movie circuit — joined Golkar lawmaker Aziz Syamsuddin on the trip.
Bakrie responded to the suspiciously timed video by characterizing the trip not as a skip over the Indian Ocean to agreeable over-water accommodation in the company of a couple of winsome actresses, but as some sort of fact-finder set up with the betterment of the rakyat in mind.
"It's to show that if [the Maldives] can be that great, why not our country?" Bakrie told reporters on Friday, as quoted by Indonesian news portal Okezone.
Indonesians may hope that the Maldives is not an accurate comparator. Ruled by a strongman for much of the last century, the Muslim-majority island nation entered a period of democratization before disintegrating into political disarray and violence.
Aziz, meanwhile, refused to say when the video was shot.
"It's a black campaign," the deputy chairman of the House of Representatives Commission III, which oversees legal affairs, told the Jakarta Globe. "A.R.B. is considered a parent to many — including me.
"You're just exaggerating to make it sensational."
While Aziz would not say when the video was filmed, it is most-likely about four years old — the May 5, 2010 issue of Indonesian news weekly, Gatra, is clearly visible on a center table on the plane in part of the video.
The video ends with a long shot of what appears to be one of the more expensive rooms at the W Retreat & Spa — a kitschy upmarket resort on Fesdu Island where the two-bedroom "Ocean Haven" currently fetches up to $8,400 a night. The room, one of two featuring the type of curved infinity pool seen in the video, is described as "the ultimate getaway, the Ocean Haven takes relaxation — or entertaining — to the extreme," on the W's website.
Golkar Party Secretary Idrus Marham said that Bakrie had been on the trip, but that several more people had been in attendance and it was not just the four of them.
"That's the trick of the video… it did not capture the whole group," Idrus said at Golkar's office, as quoted by news portal jpnn.com on Friday.
Yet only four people appear on the holiday video, which seems to present a plane-to-resort account of the Indonesian tycoon's island vacation.
He added that Bakrie, one of Indonesia's richest men, had often asked various people to join him on holiday and past destinations had included a spell to Melbourne for the Australian Open and a group holiday to Komodo.
News of the island-getaway broke this week when a hastily made blog titled "Aburizal Bakrie sik asik Marcella Olivia Zalianti di Maldives" appeared online. The blog, which only has a single post, featured a small collection of vacation snapshots.
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