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(The Insider Stories) – Karen Agustiawan, the first Indonesian female leader of PT Pertamina, has been elected by the government as the sole shareholder of the state-owned oil and gas firm to lead the energy corporation for a second tenure.

The State-Owned Enterprises Ministry's deputy for infrastructure and strategic industry Dwijanti Tjahjaningsih told The Insider Stories on Tuesday that 54-year-old Karen was indeed selected by the government to lead the most bankable state-owned corporation in Indonesia.

"Yes, we have chosen Karen Agustiawan as Pertamina CEO for a second tenure," said Dwijanti.

"She has shown good performance and thus we decide to reappoint her." Karen, who was first appointed to lead Pertamina in 2009, should have her tenure ended in March this year. (See Bio section below.)

However, she was temporarily reappointed by the government in March as President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was still on state visits to Germany and Hungary at the time.

Dwijanti confirmed that Karen's tenure had been officially extended for another five years since March 2013, making her the first CEO to lead Pertamina for a second term in decades.

She said, Deputy State-Owned Enterprises Minister Mohammad Yasin gave the official letter to Karen at the ministry's headquarters in Jakarta on Wednesday afternoon.

Karen is also the first Pertamina CEO to complete her five-year term as most of her predecessors were replaced before they completed their five-year term.

Pertamina booked a record-high Rp 25.89 trillion (US$2.67 billion) in net profits last year under Karen's tenure. In May this year, Pertamina raised US$3.25 billion from the issue of U.S. dollar-denominated bonds to international investors as part of the company’s strategy to finance its acquisition plans.

Bio:

Three decades in oil and gas for Karen Born in 1958, Agustiawan graduated from the engineering faculty of the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology in 1983, Agustiawan worked at Mobil until 1998, including a stint in Dallas, Texas.

Between 1998 and 2002, Agustiawan was a business development manager at Landmark Concurrent Solutions Indonesia, which provides drilling, exploration, data management and other services to the oil and gas sector. She served as a project manager at Halliburton after it acquired landmark, before becoming a special staff member at Pertamina’s upstream division in 2006, eventually taking over the division in 2008.

Regularly ranked among the world's most powerful women by major financial publications, Agustiawan is credited with aggressively expanding Pertamina's business reach, including acquiring domestic and overseas oil and gas blocks, developing CBM as an alternative energy source, and setting up an LNG shipping company with state-owned electricity provider PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara.

She has set an ambitious production target for Pertamina of 2.2 billion barrels of oil per day by 2025. A mother of three, Agustiawan is considered a pioneer in the male-dominated oil and gas industry – in her previous position before becoming CEO, she was also the first woman to head Pertamina’s upstream division – and is an outspoken champion of women in the workplace.