The agreement was announced by the two foreign ministers in Jakarta on Tuesday. Indonesian Foreign Minister Arrmanatha Nasir said the task force would coordinate information sharing, financial intelligence and cross border evidence gathering, and asset recovery where possible. “Smoke can cross borders, so can money. That is why we must follow the money trail these companies have left behind,” he said. Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said the two governments were putting companies on notice, and that Singapore would exercise every single legal and regulatory power against firms responsible for haze pollution, including those based in Singapore itself.
The scale behind the move is this year’s fire season. Indonesia’s wildfires burned more than 1.9 million hectares in the nine months to September, according to Nusantara Atlas, as Indonesia struggled for months to contain the blazes and haze drifted across the region.
The task force is designed to close the specific gap Singapore’s ministers have been describing all month. Singapore’s National Environment Agency has issued preventive measures notices to 10 companies in Indonesia linked to fires suspected of contributing to the haze, and information notices to 10 Singapore based companies under the Transboundary Haze Pollution Act. But Sustainability and Environment Minister Grace Fu said on October 27 that the government will propose changes to the law in Parliament, because proving who owns or controls burned land, mapping corporate structures and securing cooperation from overseas companies runs into evidence and jurisdiction limits the current act cannot cross. A specialist panel of law, audit and investigative firms was announced on October 23 to support the cross border inquiries in the meantime.
What changes with Jakarta inside the process is practical rather than rhetorical: Indonesian cooperation is what Singaporean investigators have lacked, since the concessions, land records and company officers sit in Indonesia. Asset recovery, if it happens, would be a first for haze enforcement in the region. The bill’s text, when tabled, will show how far Singapore is willing to go on its own side, including over companies that refuse to hand over information.