Eka Tjipta Widjaja

Eka Tjipta Widjaja (born Oei Ek Tjong, 1921–2019) was an Indonesian businessman of Chinese descent, founder of the Sinar Mas Group, one of Indonesia's largest conglomerates, with interests in paper, real estate, financial services, agribusiness and telecommunications ^{1 2}.

Widjaja was born Oei Ek Tjong in Quanzhou, Fujian — the Indonesian and Chinese articles give 27 February 1921, while a strand of press obituaries gives 3 October 1923, a rivalry recorded in this record's data — the son of a trader based in Makassar ^{2 3}. Around 1930 he moved with his mother to the Dutch East Indies to join his father, was educated in a local Chinese school, and left at fifteen to work as a hawker, selling biscuits and candy from his bicycle ^{1 3}.

Widjaja's early businesses included cooking oil, agricultural products, a coffee shop, pig rearing, a bakery and grave construction; Japanese occupation price controls destroyed his cooking-oil business, and the independence war crushed his commodity trading in 1949, when he sold family jewelry to repay creditors ¹. In the 1950s he sold food and supplies to Indonesian troops in Makassar and traded copra from Manado to Makassar, before moving to Surabaya, where CV Sinar Mas was registered in 1962 ^{1 3}. He opened the Bitung Manado Oil factory in 1968, acquired the Tjiwi Kimia paper company with Taiwanese investors in 1972, founded the Duta Pertiwi property business the same year, acquired Bank Internasional Indonesia in 1982 — it failed in the Asian financial crisis and was nationalized in 1999 — and returned to banking with Bank Sinarmas in 2005; his Asia Pulp & Paper's 2001 debt stop was reckoned the largest emerging-market default of its time ¹. He received an honorary doctorate from Pittsburg State University in 1990, founded the Eka Tjipta Foundation in 2006 to fund scholarships, and was named one of Forbes Asia's 48 Heroes of Philanthropy in 2010 ^{2 1}. Several of his children by his first wife Trinidewi came to lead the group's divisions — paper, financial services, property and agribusiness ¹. He died at his home in Menteng, Jakarta, on 26 January 2019 and was buried in the family cemetery in Karawang on 2 February 2019 ^{1 2}. Two texts attest a faith for the man himself, both published by the Tzu Chi foundation: its commemoration reports that at the Malam Cinta Kasih gathering in 2002 he told the audience that he is a Christian, and Master Cheng Yen's lecture of 15 November 2017 calls him a very devout Christian. Because both attestations come from the one foundation, his faith is recorded as unknown, with the two texts preserved in his record for the founder's ruling ^{4 5}.

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