Bumi: the Kiss of life? What a carry-on. On Tuesday, Bumi co-founder and former co-chairman Nathaniel Rothschild was moved to the sidelines as an ordinary director. Investors in the London-listed Indonesian coal miner may feel tempted to join him. Bumi's shares are down by one-fifth this year and almost a third since listing. For them to hang around, the rejigged board and management team need to convince investors that Bumi is more than a shambolic get-rich-quick scheme. The first task of new chairman Samin Tan, the tycoon who bailed out Indra Bakrie - Mr Rothschild's debt-constrained Indonesian partner - has been to try to draw a line under the governance concerns that have plagued Bumi. But, given Mr Tan's own resource interests and ambition, it is hard to ignore a gnawing sense that he will in time capitalise on the Bakrie family's weakness to extract greater value from the coal group, perhaps even buying them out. A priority is to simplify Bumi, integrating its separately held Bumi Resources and Berau Coal assets, and reducing the subsidiaries" precarious combined $4.6bn gross debt burden. It is not far-fetched to imagine Mr Tan folding assets of his Jakarta-listed Borneo Lumbung Energi & Metal into the London-listed mix. That would get investors" attention. But their patience is thin. Those who blithely backed Mr Rothschild's vision of superior returns from prime resource assets in frontier markets have been disappointed. Doubly so, if they also hoped that Indonesian companies would quickly be brought up to UK levels of governance. And triply so now that Bumi has reported a deeper loss of $282m after one-off accounting adjustments for 2011, compared with 2010s loss of $108m. Mr Tan offers the best hope of fixing Bumi, even if he is not what investors bargained for. At least Mr Rothschild has served Indonesian interests to a T.