Francisco Kalbuadi "Chico" Lay (; born ) is an East Timorese politician, businessman and sports administrator, and a member of the National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (, CNRT).

He is the more senior of East Timor's two incumbent Deputy Prime Ministers,The Constitution of Timor-Leste provides, in sections 104 and 105, for the appointment of officials referred to in its English language version as "Deputy Ministers". In other English language publications, those officials are commonly referred to as "Vice Ministers", even though the word "Vice", in context, arguably has a different meaning in English from the word "Deputy". In this article, the constitutional expression "Deputy" is used. and also the incumbent Coordinating Minister of Economic Affairs and Minister of Tourism and Environment, serving since July 2023 in the IX Constitutional Government of East Timor led by Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão.

Early life and career Lay was born in the then Portuguese Timor. In 1977, he was captured by the Indonesian army, and started living with Lieutenant General Dading Kalbuadi, commander of the Kopassus special forces who had infiltrated Portuguese Timor in the lead up to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Kalbuadi adopted Lay as his son, and Lay therefore took the general's family name.

As of early 1988, Lay was manager of CV Amigo, a company owned by General Kalbuadi that was operating in East Timor. At the beginning of the 1990s, Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana, also known as Tutut, eldest daughter of then Indonesian President Suharto, asked Lay, then chair of the East Timorese branch of the Jakarta-backed (, KNPI), to chair one of her charities, the Tiara Foundation, in Dili.

According to George Junus Aditjondro, an Indonesian critic of the Suharto government, and in particular its activities concerning East Timor:

TAPOL, a British NGO established to monitor human rights issues in Indonesia, reported in 1991 that the scheme was "... being encouraged by the military on the assumption that rebelliousness among young East Timorese is caused by unemployment and dissatisfaction with their lot," and that "Tutut's recruitment drive [had] the approval of BAIS, the Strategic Intelligence Agency, which [was] keen to reduce the political pressure in East Timor." However, the report went on to comment that the 'training' under the scheme was just a "two-week indoctrination course", that scheme participants were "low-paid", and that discontent with the scheme had caused tensions between local workers and Timorese in both Semarang and Bandung.

The Tiara Foundation scheme proved to be so controversial that Lay went abroad for a short period. Following his return, he was recruited by , another collaborator with the Indonesians, to manage a provincial government-protected illicit gambling business at Tasitolu near Dili. He was soon fired, amidst allegations that he had embezzled large sums of money from the business. Bishop Belo then recruited him to manage the Don Carlos Foundation, one of the charities of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Dili. In that capacity, Lay travelled with the bishop to Australia shortly before the UN-supervised East Timorese independence referendum in 1999; at the end of that year, Asiaweek described him as an "aide" to Belo.

Meanwhile, Lay had also been involved in other activities. For a long time, he was an informant for the Combined Intelligence Task Force (, SGI), the intelligence arm of Kopassus. In early 1994, TAPOL reported that Lay had travelled to Geneva with an Indonesian delegation that was negotiating with the UN Human Rights Commission over a possible chairman's consensus statement concerning East Timor. Lay's specific task, according to TAPOL, was "to keep watch over" Xavier do Amaral, who had briefly been the inaugural president of East Timor in 1975, and was part of the Indonesian delegation. The TAPOL report also asserted that Lay had accompanied Amaral to 'reconciliation talks' about East Timor held near London in December 1993.

Additionally, in 1998 Lay and two other Timorese businessmen, and Ahmad Alkatiri, a younger brother of Mari Alkatiri, combined with Gerry Hand, a former minister in Australia's Hawke and Keating governments, to plan a 30- to 40-room hotel in Dili, and tender for a 400-room complex also in Dili. Hand had been, but was no longer, running several joint ventures on Christmas Island with Robby Sumampouw, a prominent Indonesian businessman. In mid-1998, columnist Brian Toohey wrote in the Australian Financial Review that:

Sports administrator career Football Lay has been described by The Oekusi Post as "a great football player". He was president of the Timor-Leste Football Federation ( (FFTL)) from 2002 to 2007, and again from 2008 to 2018.

He also served as one of the vice presidents of the ASEAN Football Federation (AFF) from 2011 to 2015, as a member of the executive committee of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) from 2015 to 2019, and again as a vice president of the AFF from 2019 to 2023.

Lay's terms of office as president of the FFTL, and also the interregnum between them, were marred by controversy. In 2007, the 13 FFTL voting members called an extraordinary congress, and purported to elect Pedro Carrascalão as president. Carrascalão alleged that the FFTL members had been forced to initiate the extraordinary congress because the FFTL had failed to hold a regular congress, including a presidential vote, on time. He also claimed that members were concerned about possible corruption. When Lay declared that the extraordinary congress was 'illegal', Carrascalão wrote to the AFC setting out his allegations against Lay and the FFTL, and asking the AFC to investigate the matter. He later travelled to Kuala Lumpur to meet with the AFC, which indicated that it would only recognise Lay as the FFTL's president. Carrascalão then decided to abandon his post.

In 2012, Lay became embroiled in a different controversy, when an internal audit of the AFC found that its president, Mohammed bin Hammam of Qatar, had routinely given tens of thousands of dollars in cash to federation presidents and their families, including 50,000 to Lay, Bin Hammam was later banned from football for life, on the grounds that he had had "conflicts of interest" while AFC president. for "personal expenses".

Subsequently, in early 2015, ahead of the preliminary World Cup qualifiers, Lay declared, on the FIFA website, that "[i]t doesn't matter if Timor win, the most important thing is that football wins." In September of that year, however, two East Timorese were imprisoned in Singapore for attempting, with a key associate of notorious match fixer, Dan Tan, and an Indonesian referee, to fix Timor-Leste's opening football match at that year's South-East Asian Games. The following month, October 2015, the Palestinian Football Association formally requested that FIFA investigate the eligibility of seven Brazilian-born footballers who had played for Timor-Leste that month in a World Cup qualifying match. The request also triggered a parliamentary inquiry, and caused activists to take to the streets to demand change.

In the immediate aftermath of the request, the FFTL ceased using Brazilian players in the Timor-Leste national team. But when the federation resumed selecting the Brazilians in June 2016, the CFA disciplinary committee initiated an investigation. In December 2016, the Lusa News Agency reported that a decision on the issue was expected soon, as the investigation had concluded that Brazilian players had been registered for the Timor-Leste national team with false birth or baptism certificates.

On 20 January 2017, the disciplinary committee decided to exclude Timor-Leste from the 2023 AFC Asian Cup, fined the FFTL 20,000. As the Brazilians had played in 29 games sanctioned by the CFA, the disciplinary committee also ruled that Timor-Leste forfeited those games, and fined the FFTL a further 50,000 suspended for a two-year probationary period. The Brazilians had also played in seven games sanctioned by FIFA, and the disciplinary committee notified FIFA of its decision. Additionally, the committee banned the secretary general of the FFTL, Amândio de Araújo Sarmento, from football-related activities for three years and fined him 9,000, and fined another FFTL official, Gelásio Da Silva Carvalho, 3,000 for attempting to interfere with the investigation. The AFC statement announcing the committee's decision did not mention Lay.

In response to the decision, , head of Liga Futebol Amadora (LFA), the country's domestic football competition, called for a full substitution of the FFTL board by the LFA board. According to Dili newspaper Jornal Independente, Lay had "... said that the [FFTL] board had ordered the falsifications." Later that year, , hitherto the vice president of the FFTL, became acting president; Lay's permanent replacement, Francisco Jerónimo, was elected on 24 February 2018.

Olympic sports On 18 November 2013, Lay was elected President of the National Olympic Committee of Timor-Leste ( (CONTL)). He was reelected to that position on 16 January 2018, and again on 14 June 2022, in the latter case by acclamation at a general assembly attended by 21 national sporting federations.

Political career Early parliamentary career Lay began his political career as a member of the Fretilin party. In 2001, he was elected as a Fretilin candidate to the Constituent Assembly of East Timor, from which the National Parliament emerged in 2002. During that legislative term, he was one of three members nominated by the Constituent Assembly to join the commission responsible for assessing the needs of the future National Parliament, and was later President of the Economics and Finance Commission of the National Parliament.

Lay was not included in the list of candidates for the 2007 parliamentary election. By 2012, he had switched his allegiance to the CNRT; he served as President of the CNRT's political campaigns committee for that year's parliamentary election, but once again was not in the list of candidates.

Minister of Tourism

On 8 August 2012, Lay was sworn in as the Minister of Tourism in the V Constitutional Government led by Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão. When that Constitutional Government was replaced on 16 February 2015 by the VI Constitutional Government led by new Prime Minister Rui Maria de Araújo, Lay continued as a minister, under the new designation Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture.

In 2017, Lay defeated the incumbent Secretary General of the CNRT, Dionísio Babo Soares, in an election for that post at the party congress.

In that year's parliamentary election, Lay returned to the National Parliament at #5 on the CNRT list, but he resigned on 6 September 2017, the second day of the session. With the CNRT going into opposition after the election, Lay also lost his ministerial post upon formation of the VI Constitutional Government on 15 September 2017. One of his replacements, Manuel Vong, was sworn in as Minister of Tourism; the other, Fernando Hanjam, became Minister of Education and Culture.

Political controversies In 2018, the National Parliament was dissolved early. In the elections that followed, Lay was again elected to the parliament, this time in 4th place on the list of the Alliance for Change and Progress (AMP), of which the CNRT was part. During the formation of the VIII Constitutional Government, Lay was nominated for appointment as Minister for Trade, Industry, Environment and Tourism. However, President Francisco Guterres rejected that nomination and 10 others, in Lay's case because he had allegedly been involved in a corruption scandal.