Celebrity antitrust: The Asia-Pacific Tipline for 11 October 2019

To help fend off claims in Indonesia that it engaged in discriminatory conduct, popular ride-hailing company Grab has retained the services of a lawyer named Hotman Paris Hutapea. He has acted in some of the country’s highest-profile cases, and his LinkedIn page lists international finance, bankruptcy, administrative and criminal law as his areas of expertise. With 4.1 million Instagram followers, he may be the first social media celebrity to defend an antitrust case. At times accused of unscrupulous practices in a corrupt Indonesian legal world, Hutapea was quoted in the New York Times in 2010 as saying: “If I say I’m a clean lawyer, I’ll be a hypocrite, that’s all I can say. And if other lawyers say they are clean, they will go to jail, they’ll go to hell.”