Raj Kannan, President Director of Tusk Advisory talks about the company

Raj Kannan, President Director of Tusk Advisory talks about the company.

Can you give some background on Tusk Advisory?

Tusk Advisory started in Singapore and has been in Indonesia for almost 12 years.

First time I was in Indonesia, I was the advisor to the Ministry of Public Works, engaged by the World Bank in 2004. At that time, the government was going through democratization. Basically, we were hired to help Ministry of Public Works to implement its reforms in terms of delivering massive amount of infrastructure, coming out with policies, regulatory reforms, institutional reforms, fiscal reform, etc.

At that time, I was with an Australian firm, which basically majored in advising government in Public-Private-Partnership (PPP) and infrastructure advisory. Then, I went back to Australia and we advised government of Queensland on a major infrastructure program-a AU$66-billion program.

In the middle of 2007, I came back and set up Tusk. So, Tusk, as an entity, has been around since 2007. Our original aim was to explore the option of doing M&A and also to invest in infrastructure. Unfortunately, we realized that some of the reforms that we had developed and proposed during our earlier time were not really done, because government being government, which takes a while to get things done. So, we decided that one of the key value add that we can do is to advise the government on implementing some of those reforms.

We were lucky that we were at the right place, right time; we were hired by the founding shareholders of the first infrastructure bank in Indonesia, specifically forth purposes of supporting infrastructure delivery in terms of funding long term infrastructure deals. So we were hired to establish this institution, interim-manage the institution, and handover to the new management team. So that started us growing as strategic advisors not only to government, but also to private sector. More importantly, we have also done a lot of market entry analysis for foreign direct investors from all over the world. We have helped sovereign fund, infrastructure fund, and larger corporations from Europe, Asia, etc. Intrinsically, we keep our core competency, which is advising government at the senior level. We were hired to produce the government 5-year business plan called RPJMN. We would also do a lot of work with donor agencies, as well as government agencies.
Since that time, we have been also involved in establishing institutions that are related to delivering infrastructure, like the coordinating agency for delivering government’s priority projects. It is an institution that we developed from concept, and now we are the supporting them, along with the private sector management they hired. We assisted the management to reach the mandate of the institution.