Scandals tarnish Citibank's image in Indonesia
By Andrew Higgins,
TANGERANG, Indonesia — Irzen Octa, a down-on-his-luck Indonesian businessman, suffered a torment familiar to millions of Americans struggling with debts racked up in better times: He feared losing his home.
In the end, he managed to keep the ramshackle two-story house where he and his wife raised their two now-teenage daughters. Instead, Octa, pursued by Citibank over a $5,700 debt on his platinum credit card, lost his life.
The 50-year-old businessman, invited to a Citibank office in Jakarta in late March, collapsed in a tiny room set aside by the U.S. bank for questioning of deadbeat debtors. He died shortly afterward — a casualty of a "harsh interrogation," said Jakarta police spokesman Baharudin Djafar.
Citibank, Indonesia's biggest foreign bank, said its internal investigation found no evidence of physical violence.
The tragedy — which came just days after police arrested a Citibank executive in a separate scandal over swindled clients — has tarnished the image of an American icon in the world's most populous Muslim nation. It also cast a spotlight on a dark corner of international banking — the outsourcing of debt collection to unregulated agents in booming but unruly emerging markets.
The interview room where Octa met Citibank's debt agents was sealed with yellow tape; police declared it a crime scene. Five people, none of them Citibank employees, have been arrested on suspicion of "group violence" and "mistreatment resulting in death."
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