Mochtar Riady

Mochtar Riady (born Lie Mo Tie, 12 May 1929) is an Indonesian banker and business magnate of Chinese descent, founder of the Lippo Group, whose career ran from a village shop in Jember through the revival of three banks and the raising of Bank Central Asia to the founding of Lippobank and one of Indonesia's largest conglomerates ^{1 2}.

Riady was born Lie Mo Tie on 12 May 1929 at Malang in East Java, to batik-trader parents from Fujian, and went to Fujian at the age of nine to study before returning to Malang in 1942. As a youth he fought in the independence struggle; in 1947 he went to China and studied philosophy at the University of Nanking, returning to Indonesia in 1950 and joining his father-in-law's trading business at Jember, where his talent for banking showed itself in the small shop's growing deposits ^{2 3}.

Summoned to Jakarta in 1954, Riady turned around a succession of troubled banks — Bank Kemakmuran, Bank Buana and Panin Bank — and then, with Sudono Salim, built Bank Central Asia into a giant, earning the name "the Magic Man of Bank Marketing". In 1989 he founded his own Lippobank, the seed of the Lippo Group, which grew across finance, property, retail, health and education in Indonesia and Hong Kong; a 1996 Harvard Business School case study in strategy+business already reckoned the group's assets at US$11 billion ^{2 4}. He published his autobiography, Mochtar Riady: My Life Story, in 2017 ². Two independent texts attest his faith for the man himself: the Chinese article states that he and his wife are both devout Christians, and the strategy+business case study states that Christianity is the source of his spirituality — alongside Confucianism as his guiding philosophy — so his faith is recorded as Christian, documented ^{3 4}.

• ¹
• ²
• ³
• ⁴
• ⁵