JAKARTA, March 5 (Xinhua) -- Indonesia’s Coordinating Minister for Maritime and Investment, Luhut Binsar Pandjaitan, said here on Thursday that the country will increase the number of sea toll routes to 26 as they give many benefits.
The government will give a tax allowance and a longer tax holiday to industries that are built in eastern areas of Indonesia to meet the needs of those areas. So that there would be not too many shipments from Java Island (in the western part of the country) to reduce costs, the senior minister told reporters after attending a limited meeting at the presidential office in the country’s capital city of Jakarta.
According to Pandjaitan, Indonesian President Joko Widodo had decided that the tax allowance and tax holiday would be given earlier to industries built in eastern Indonesia.
"Thus the new routes would reduce shipments of goods from western Indonesia. This year, the subsidy for the project would amount to around 400 billion Indonesian rupiahs (some 28.1 million U.S. dollars)," he noted.
There would not only be one but two or three agents that would distribute goods so that there would be no monopoly by one company, the coordinating minister was quoted by the Indonesian Cabinet Secretariat as saying.
