Bob Hasan

Bob Hasan was an Indonesian businessman, who served briefly as trade and industry minister in 1998 and was later jailed for corruption. He was one of the most prominent ethnic Chinese cronies of long-serving Indonesian president Suharto and was nicknamed "the plywood king" because of his forestry businesses. He was also a trained architect who contributed to the development of Jakarta and other cities through his projects such as Ancol Dreamland, Pondok Indah, and Bumi Serpong Damai. He was known as one of Indonesia's most generous philanthropists, who established ten schools, the Ciputra University of Entrepreneurship in Surabaya, and the Ciputra Artpreneur Museum in Jakarta. He was born in Semarang, Central Java, in 1931, and grew up in poverty after his father was arrested and killed by the Japanese during World War II. He studied architecture at the Bandung Institute of Technology and started his own consulting firm with his friends while still in university. He moved to Jakarta and became the CEO of Pembangunan Jaya, a developer partly owned by the Jakarta provincial government. He later founded the Metropolitan Group with his friends and investors, and then the Ciputra Group for his family. He married Pertiwi Hasan, whom he met in Sulawesi, and had two children, who both serve on the boards of the Ciputra Group and Ciputra Development. He passed away in Singapore in 2020 at the age of 89.