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Court rules in favor of Tommy
The government failed Wednesday in its latest bid to prosecute former president Soeharto’s youngest son, Hutomo “Tommy” Mandala Putra, on charges of selling assets of his failed national car project to his own company
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The government failed Wednesday in its latest bid to prosecute former president Soeharto’s youngest son, Hutomo “Tommy” Mandala Putra, on charges of selling assets of his failed national car project to his own company.
The failure was the latest blow in attempts to recover funds from the former first family, underway since Soeharto stepped down in 1998.
According to graft watchdog Transparency International, the family amassed billions of US dollars during Soeharto’s three-decade rule.
The panel of judges at the Central Jakarta District Court threw out the government’s civil lawsuit against Tommy, saying prosecutors had failed to provide adequate evidence to charge him with undervalued buyback transactions involving companies under the same ownership, which allegedly benefited the businessman to the tune of more than Rp 3.5 trillion.
“The panel doesn’t find any indications that the companies… are related to each other, thus it has decided that the transaction was legal,” presiding judge Reno Lisnowo said at Wednesday’s hearing.
Prosecutor Nurtamam said the judges “chose to ignore” the evidence, and added prosecutors would immediately appeal.
The case began in 1999 when Tommy’s national car firm, PT Timor Putra Nasional, handed over its assets to the now-defunct Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA) as collateral against an outstanding debt of Rp 4 trillion to the state. In April 2003, IBRA resold the assets to the little-known firm Vista Bella for only Rp 445 billion.
The sale meant the loan transfer rights were handed over from the government to Vista Bella, allowing the latter to collect the Rp 4 trillion debt from Timor.
However, the government later said the transaction was unlawful, after the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) revealed that Vista Bella was affiliated with Timor.
The Attorney General’s Office filed a civil lawsuit against Tommy in June last year, on the grounds that the sale of Timor’s assets to Vista Bella was illegal because both
companies were under the same ownership.
The prosecutors demanded Tommy and his companies — Vista Bella, Timor, PT Humpuss and PT Mandala Buana Bakti – pay Rp 4 trillion in damages for the undervalued transaction.
Commenting on Wednesday’s ruling, AGO spokesman M. Jasman Pandjaitan said the setback would not hamper the AGO’s attempts to file an appeal with the Guernsey Supreme Court in the UK regarding another case in which Tommy is embroiled.
The AGO is currently waiting for the Guernsey High Court to decide whether it was qualified to be able to file an appeal with the Guernsey Supreme Court.
The appeal was filed after the high court issued a verdict that prevented the Indonesian government from extending a freeze on a 36 million euro fund belonging to Tommy’s Garnet Investment company, currently stored at the Guernsey branch of BNP Paribas.
