In terms of getting information, TBI Semarang was always a difficult proposition. Their Facebook page had photos from the opening ceremony on there 4 years after the school opened, with nothing new added. This sloppy, lazy approach is typical of many things TBI does because as we said last week: they don’t really care. Getting info from such a school isn’t easy because no one is putting anything out there.

We knew from one old informant, the former Actel, that Head Office’s choice Helmy had been a catastrophe who couldn’t keep his hands out of the till or his hands to himself in the presence of female employees. His alleged plunder of the school and loss making promos destroyed trust and confidence between the school and Head Office from the start but this info was a few years old. When the school closed at the end of last year we had no new details of why. But now we have received a morsel of new info from one of our sources. It isn’t much but it is consistent with the picture of utter dysfunctionality we have been painting.

According to our informant, TBI Semarang had told Head Office that it didn’t want to continue paying royalties after the way Head Office had misled its owners. They had heard that Preece was no more to be trusted than Mariam and Retty and were having nothing to do with him. TBI wouldn’t budge on the royalty issue so TBI Semarang slipped out of the fold. It is typical that franchise owners think Head Office is so bad that they don’t want to pay royalties- the owners of TBI Kelapa Gading resented paying their 4% as well. But our informant says that TBI Semarang is probably going to open under a new name: two schools have now had enough of Kartikatresni’s unprofessional style and dumped her unceremoniously. This means that just like TBI Malang, the loss of these schools was a black eye for the TBI Mafia but nothing at all to worry about in terms of lost jobs. They are just scare-mongering to try and win sympathy and support.