Indonesia's President Prabowo Subianto sacked his own chief of staff on Wednesday, November 4, a day after the man was arrested with two other senior police officers on suspicion of wiretapping the president, cabinet ministers and others — an alleged spying operation the presidential palace says could amount to treason, Reuters reported from Jakarta.

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The sacked chief of staff is Listyo Sigit Prabowo, who is not a relative of the president despite sharing his surname. He was among three serving police officers detained and accused of illegally tapping the phones of the president, journalists, politicians, business people and others from 2025 into this year, according to police and the palace.

Source: Reuters via BusinessWorld

What the palace said

Announcing the sacking, presidential spokesperson Prasetyo Hadi told reporters the alleged wiretapping was carried out by “certain rogue individuals” and that “what was done may already fall into a category that can be considered an act tending toward treason.” He added: “It also tends toward acts that endanger state interests and the safety of the nation's leadership, including the safety of the head of state.”

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What police say the three officers did

Police said late on Tuesday that the suspects were being investigated for unlawful wiretaps on the president, state officials, media, politicians, business people, and leaders of mass organisations and non-governmental groups. The wiretaps were orchestrated without a formal request from investigators, police said, and last month the suspects ordered the electronic records of their monitoring activities to be deleted. Police initially identified the three men only by the initials of their names.

Source: Australian Associated Press

Local media named the other two officers as Ahrie Sonta Nasution, head of the national police legal division, and Eko Hadi Santoso, a senior officer at the national police educational institution. Listyo himself had run the entire national police force for five years before President Prabowo moved him into the chief of staff job in October.

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Why it matters beyond Jakarta

The arrests land while President Prabowo is already under pressure on several fronts — a slumping approval rating amid discontent over his policies, and a fight to restore investor confidence after record stock market selloffs, a declining currency and warnings of an equities-market downgrade by index provider MSCI, Reuters noted. Political analyst Yanuar Nugroho, a visiting senior fellow at Singapore's Yusof Ishak Institute, said the chief of staff role under Prabowo had diminished in importance and that Listyo — known as a loyalist of former President Joko Widodo — may have been given the job to take him away from the crucial post of national police chief. Prabowo needs a police chief he can trust, and Listyo “is not the one”, Yanuar said.

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What happens next

Investigators must now establish who ordered the alleged taps, whose phones were listened to and what was done with what was heard — and whether anyone outside the three detained officers was involved. No successor as chief of staff has been announced in the reports so far, and the case is likely to sharpen the wider fight over who controls Indonesia's police, one of the most powerful institutions in the world's fourth most populous country and Southeast Asia's largest economy.

Source: Australian Associated Press