Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto today sacked his chief of staff, Listyo Sigit Prabowo, a day after Listyo was arrested with two senior police officers on suspicion of wiretapping the president, cabinet ministers and others.
Listyo, who is not related to the president, was national police chief for five years before he became chief of staff last month. The three officers are accused of illegally tapping the phones of the president, journalists, politicians, business people and others from 2025 to this year.
Presidential spokesman Prasetyo Hadi said the acts were carried out by “rogue individuals” and could fall into the category of acts tending towards treason. He said they also endangered state interests and the safety of the nation’s leadership, including the head of state.
Police said the suspects had carried out the wiretaps without a formal request from investigators and last month ordered electronic records of their monitoring to be deleted. Yusril Ihza Mahendra, Indonesia’s senior minister for legal affairs, said the motive had yet to be determined. Local media named the other two suspects as Ahrie Sonta Nasution, head of the national police legal division, and Eko Hadi Santoso, a senior officer at the national police education institution.
The arrests come as Prabowo faces pressure on several fronts, including a falling approval rating, record stock market sell-offs, a weaker rupiah and warnings from index provider MSCI of a possible downgrade of Indonesia’s equity market.
Yanuar Nugroho, a visiting senior fellow at Singapore’s ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, said Listyo, who is known as a loyalist of former president Joko Widodo, may have been given the chief of staff post to move him out of the crucial job of national police chief.