Indonesia
Indonesia to waive tourism visa for 5 countries
The government will waive visa requirements for the citizens of several countries in a bid to attract 20 million tourists by 2020, according to The Jakarta Post.
The government will waive visa requirements for the citizens of several countries in a bid to attract 20 million tourists by 2020, according to The Jakarta Post.
“Based on the coordination meeting result, there will be five countries; Australia, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea, which are to be granted visa-free access by the government,” Coordinating Maritime Affairs Minister Indroyono Soesilo said in Jakarta on Wednesday.
Through the programme the government expected to see additional 500,000 tourist arrivals in a year, he said.
The government needed to spend around US$11.5 million on the plan. The minister said, however, that with projected additional tourist arrivals and spending potential, the government would receive minimum revenue of $540 million per year, on the assumption that every tourist spent around $1,200 per visit to Indonesia.
In addition, the government plans to facilitate the permit process for yachts and international cruise ships wanting to enter the country’s ports.
“We will strengthen the online system set up by the Foreign Ministry,” he said, adding that the government had set a target to finalize such permits in a day. With easier permit issuance, he expected leaders in the regions to promote their regions so that Indonesia could attract many tourists.
via Indonesia to waive visa requirements for 5 countries – Thai PBS English News.
Asean
The Indonesia-Singapore Bilateral Investment Treaty Comes into Effect
Through the upgraded DTAA, the tax rate on branch profits was reduced from 15 to 10 percent, and the tax rate on royalties for copyrighted works of literature, arts, and film, and eight percent for the use of industrial, scientific, or commercial equipment was lowered from 15 to 10 percent.
The latest Indonesia-Singapore Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) came into effect on March 9, 2021, and replaces the previous BIT, which was signed in June 2006 and expired in June 2016.
– The vehicle is widely used to help tech start-ups go public
– Both Singapore’s and Indonesia’s exchanges are set to allow SPACs
– Several South-east Asian tech unicorns may use SPACs to list publicly
South-east Asia is seeing a wave of interest in special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, with various major tech players considering them as a means to fast-track public listings. In parallel to this, several exchanges in the region are moving to allow SPAC listings, with a view to boosting post-coronavirus growth.
SPACs are shell companies set up by investors and then listed on a given stock exchange. Their sole function is to acquire a private company, enabling it to go public without having to go through a traditional initial public offering (IPO).
A SPAC does nothing beyond its essential function – it neither produces nor sells anything, and a SPAC’s only assets are the funds raised from its own IPO.
Crucially, people who buy into a SPAC do not know what its eventual acquisition target or targets will be. This is why SPACs are often referred to as “blank cheque companies”: they give the founders a free rein to back their choice of private company. A key feature of SPACs is that they are often headed by big-name business executives or fund managers, who trade on past successes to inspire trust in investors.
While they are far from a novel phenomenon, SPACs have become a hot button topic in recent times: SPAC initial offerings quadrupled last year, with the vehicles raising a record $80bn.
Merging with a SPAC enables a company to go public and raise capital more quickly and painlessly than with a traditional IPO, circumventing some of the volatility that Covid-19 unleashed on global markets. At the same time, they function rather like venture capital, helping investors to buy into high-growth start-ups on the ground floor.
Asean
Indonesia’s Omnibus Law: Positive Investment List and the Liberalization of Business Sectors
Examples of non-fiscal incentives are the provision of supporting infrastructure, simplified business licensing procedures, and the guaranteed energy supply or raw materials.
In the first of ASEAN Briefing’s Indonesia’s Omnibus Law series, we analyze Presidential Regulation 10 of 2021 (PR 10/2021) on business fields open to investment — also dubbed as the positive investment list. The regulation comes into effect on March 4, 2021.
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