In recent days Rumah Bahasa have gone on the offensive in an attempt to silence all dissent and hush-up the scandal about their school. (We use the word “school” loosely, as the word “school” usually suggests the presence of qualified teachers and there are allegedly none at Rumah Bahasa.) To people who have observed TBI’s disgraceful response to the TBI Bekasi scandal, none of this should come as any surprise. Faced with compelling evidence that Rumah Bahasa has an untenable business model based on visa fraud and exploitation of teachers and staff they have …. shot the messenger, threatening to sue the original whistle-blower if he does not remove all trace of his revelations from the Internet.

In 2009 Indonesia was scandalized by a disgraceful case where Prita Mulyasari, a patient of Omni Hospital (Rumah Sakit Omni) was sued by the hospital management for defamation based on an email she wrote complaining about the service she received at the hospital. In an appalling attack on free speech, the court decided in favor of the cashed-up hospital over the unhappy customer and ordered to pay a large sum of money to the hospital. The decision provoked widespread outrage from the media and general public, who are fed up with the bullying tactics of the powerful and well-connected in the corruption-rife nation. Sadly, Rumah Bahasa has now gone down the same path, threatening to sue the original whistle-blower for stating the simple truth: Rumah Bahasa is not a PT. and its teachers are illegally employed. Furthermore, they have also started to go down the ad hominem attacks and character assassination route, which was one of the favorite tactics of the TBI Mafia too, alleging that the whistle-blower is a “known trouble-maker” blah blah blah ….

We throw down a challenge to the owners and managers of this school. If they are a real PT., show us the documentation. If some of their expat teachers have KITASes and these allegations are indeed “defamatory, then show us scans of the KITASes with the name of the PT. on them. But if these allegations are true and they are just sorry that they don’t get to defraud and exploit behave with impunity, then we have no intention of removing these posts from this blog. Sue us. Let’s see how much media attention this house of cards really wants.

Prita Mulyasari- a victim of corporate persecution