By Andi Abdussalam
Jakarta, June 17 (ANTARA) - The Indonesian Attorney General's Office (AGO) is questioning several of its top officers for alleged links with a bribery case after a record of bugged conversations was released in last week's corruption criminal court session.
The AGO officials being investigated are Junior Attorney General for Civil and State Administrative Cases Untung Adji Santoso, Junior Attorney General for Intelligence Wisnu Subroto and former Junior Attorney General for Special Crimes Kemas Yahya Rahman.
Lask week's corruption criminal court heard a junior attorney general's bugged conversations with Artalyta Suryani, a businesswoman being tried for allegedly bribing a public prosecutor investigating a BLBI (Bank Indonesia Liquidity Assistance) case.
Attorney General Hendarman instructed the Junior Attorney General for Supervision to seek a clarification on the telephone conversation between Suryani and Kemas Yahya Rahman over the weekend.
"This morning I ordered the Junior Attorney General for Supervision to seek a clarification on the recorded conversation," Supandji said after attending a social function in Magelang.
To investigate the case, the AGO set up an investigating team of the office of the Junior Attorney General for Supervision.
On Tuesday, the team began grilling Untung Udji Santoso and would continue to investigate Wisnu Subroto and Kemas Yahya Rahman.
The three senior AGO officials were investigated on the basis of intercepted telephone conversations Suryani had held with Rahman when he was still the Junior Attorney General for Special Cases.
The conversations occurred one day after Rahman announced the suspension of an inquiry into a BLBI case involving business tycoon Syamsul Nursalim on whose behalf Suryani was believed to have committed the bribery.
In the conversation, a record of which was played in a court session on Suryani's case on Wednesday last week, Rahman had also made references to Santoso and Subroto.
The bribery case came to light last March (March 2, 2008) when the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) agents caught Urip Tri Gunawan red-handed receiving a bribe of US$660,000 from Artalyta Suryani in a house in South Jakarta.
Gunawan is the former head of a team of 35 prosecutors that had investigated the BLBI debtor's case. Following Urip Tri Gunawaan's arrest for receiving Suryani's bribe, Yahya was removed from his position but not prosecuted.
The BLBI refers to emergency liquidity credits extended by BI, the central bank, to commercial banks during the financial crisis which began in mid 1997.
The credits were extended under the government's blanket guarantee program. Of the Rp144.5 trillion of BLBI loans issued since 1997, Rp51.7 trillion had turned bad.
Junior Attorney General for Supervision MS Raharjo said the AGO had asked the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) -- whose investigators had bugged Suryani's telephone calls -- for a transcript of the telephone records to support the questioning of the three senior AGO officials.
The AG0 team would also request the KPK's readiness to provide additional clarifications on the telephone conversation records.
Meanwhile, the AGO's chief information officer, BD Nainggolan, said the AGO supervision department was interrogating 11 staffers belonging to the civil and state administrative and the special cases departments to verify clues obtained from Suryani's telephone conversations that AGO officials handling the BLBI case had actually tried to arrest her "for appearance's sake" to cover up their own wrongdoing.
Supandji said he had to wait for the completion of the court trials of businesswoman Artalita Suryani and Public Prosecutor Urip Tri Gunawan to know whether more AGO staffers were implicated in the bribery case.
He said when it was proven in court Suryani's bribe to Gunawan was linked to Syamsul Nursalim's BLBI debt, the AGO would obviously reopen its investigation into the case.
The government had since tried to solve the BLBI problem but has met with still unsurmounted difficulties to fully recover the state assets. Though some of the bad debt cases have been settled, others remained unresolved. The amounts of the recovered as well as the yet-to-be recovered credits even remained unclear.
In the meantime, the Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said the handling of BLBI cases should be entrusted to the KPK instead of the Attorney General's Office (AGO) as the latter had proven incapable of tackling corruption.
"Although it has set up an anti-corruption team, the AGO has proven incapable of dealing with corruption in the country," ICW researcher Febri Diannsyah said.
Diansyah referred to what had transpired in on-going court trials of businesswoman Artalita.
"As shown by Artalita's conversations with a number of public prosecutors, conditions in the AGO have made it incapable of handling corruption cases," the ICW activist said.
(T.A014/A/HAJM/A/E002) (T.A014/A/A014/A/E002) 17-06-2008 22:34:42
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