President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will leave for London on Monday morning to attend the G20 Summit on April 2, presidential spokesman Dino Patti Djalal said Sunday.
The President is scheduled to arrive back in Indonesia on Friday before immediately leaving Jakarta once more to campaign for his Democratic Party ahead of the April 9 legislative elections.
The G20 Summit comprises of the 20 member countries with the largest global GDPs. According to the World Bank, Indonesia ranked the world’s 20th largest economy in 2007.
The upcoming London Summit will be a follow-up to the first G20 Summit in Washington DC in November last year, which Yudhoyono also attended.
The Washington Summit issued a Leaders’ Declaration and Action Plan to deal with the global economic crisis, which encouraged G20 member countries to take initiatives toward solving the financial turmoil, Dino said.
The meeting will also see the G20 member countries come up with strategies to prevent a similar crisis from recurring in the future.
“Indonesia has been pushing for efforts to be made at the second G20 Summit in London to develop more concrete and real solutions to tackling the global economic recession, including its impacts on developing countries,” Dino said in a news conference last week.
“We need quick solutions to solve the banking problems in the United States and Europe, and to solve the toxic assets problems. We also need to establish a Global Expenditure Fund and require reform in the global financial system.”
Dino said while in London, President Yudhoyono was also scheduled to have bilateral meetings with leaders of a number of other G20 countries including Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
“We’re still exploring the possibility of a meeting with [US] President Barack Obama,” Dino said.
During the visit, Yudhoyono is also scheduled to deliver a speech at the London School of Economic and Political Science (LSE) on Tuesday.
Dino told The Jakarta Post that Yudhoyono would fly on board national flag carrier Garuda Indonesia despite a flight ban on all Indonesian airlines in EU airspace.
The Garuda plane transporting the President to the UK capital would be exempted from the ban because of its status as a “presidential carrier”, Dino argued.
The flight ban, imposed by the European Commission, came into effect in mid-2007 for all Indonesian airlines due to safety concerns following a series of fatal accidents involving airlines in the country.
