We have been made aware of a hashtag campaign, #waspadaihuseinlee. Now as anyone who reads this blog will know, we are no fans of Mr. Lee. His language school, International Language Center, is a con. He doesn’t say salaries on time or sometimes even at all. ILC Permata Hijau opened a sales booth and took student payments of up to Rp. 18 million from some customers. When the plans for the school were cancelled, ILC did not refund its customers.

Furthermore, numerous students have complained about false promises of good facilities and convenient schedules. It is also true that there have been many complaints of sexual harassment in ILC schools. ILC personnel have a nasty reputation for sexually harassing their colleagues and customers, both male and female. (More on this below).

However, I am not going to accept anti-gay slurs such as ‘homo’. Nor am I going to allow people to make ranting posts about ‘sodomy’ on this blog. If you have a complaint to make about ILC, and there is certainly no shortage of things to complain about, please focus on the conduct rather than the sexual orientation of the offender.

Gay CEOs: What’s the Problem?

Many successful CEOs have been gay, even though many of them have chosen to remain in the closet. In 2014, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that he was gay. If the most successful company in the world has a gay CEO, then surely the idea that gay people are somehow unfit for management is wrong. Furthermore, former CEO of BP, John Browne, was gay and he led BP for 12 years. Jason Grenfell-Gardner, head of pharmaceutical giant ICI Laboratories was gay too. So the idea of a gay manager should not be controversial in 2015.

Numerous people have commented that Husein Lee, the manager/owner of ILC is gay. This is not the reason why ILC deserves to be condemned. Husein Lee’s sexual preferences are not the reason why his school is so awful. Husein’s inadequacies as a manager stem from the fact that he is a dishonest, exploitative con-man. I don’t really see how his sexual preferences are related to that. The man is a confidence trickster who has cheated teachers and customers out of a lot of money. This, not his sexuality, is what makes him a bad person.

ILC: A Hotbed of Sexual Harassment, Straight and Gay

This blog is interested in the ugly truth about the Indonesian TEFL industry. It is NOT interested in promoting homophobic hate campaigns against ethnic or sexual minorities. I have removed posts which vilify Husein Lee because he is Chinese-Indonesian, and I have not published posts which use racial and sexual slurs. These sorts of posts represent a lazy mode of thinking in which racial or sexual identity is seen as the cause of criminal behavior. This sort of thinking is an insult to members of those minorities who do not engage in fraudulent and criminal conduct, and are therefore offensive and misleading. I myself am gay and am strongly opposed to corruption in public life.

However, there is a story to tell about ILC in terms of sexual impropriety, but it is not about whether the owner happens to prefer men. The real story is about rampant sexual harassment, straight and gay. I will try and outline the facts, without any offensive language, in the space below. Facts are always welcome on this blog, provided they are offered in an impartial way.

• Husein Lee forces women staff to wear very short skirts at work
• Husein Lee discriminates against women who wear jilbabs (Islamic head-scarfs)
• Husein Lee pressures female staff to aggressively flirt with male customers to get them to sign up
• Werdy Kasim, one of the main figures in ILC, has been accused of sexual assault in his last job
• Husein Lee’s ‘right hand man’, Werdy Kasim, an alleged sex offender, is in charge of many women and he constantly sexually harasses and pressures the women who work for him
• There are frequent sexual liaisons between managers and staff members at ILC, and the entire atmosphere of the school is highly sexualized
• One ILC employs a Western expat who allegedly created a home-made porn website featuring Indonesian women performing sexual acts
• Sexual advances have frequently been made to potential customers (both male and female) from men who work at ILC
• Some of the gay sales staff at ILC have made unwanted sexual advances on heterosexual males
• Students at ILC have been pressured to have sex with staff members, managers and teachers
• Sexual harassment of all kinds is extremely common with the school

These allegations came from a number of different people who have sent in comments over the last few weeks. The comments come from all over the Greater Jakarta region, so there is clearly reason for concern. There is every reason to believe that ILC is staffed by people who should rightly be nowhere near a school. But please stick to the facts and stay objective.