Hundreds of victims from the alleged fraud case of securities firm PT Sarijaya Permana Sekuritas are to file a civil lawsuit against stock market authorities.
The Sarijaya customers will sue the Stock Market and Financial Institutions Supervisory Agency (Bapepam-LK) and the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) for negligence in their monitoring role, leading up to their failure to detecting the fraud, said Teguh Hartono, the representative of Sarijaya customers from Bogor branch.
"Sarijaya is one of the big local securities houses, how can they claim did not know anything about this case earlier, but disclosed it *only* at the last minute when all the money was gone," Teguh said over the phone on Thursday.
Teguh said his group was now making coordination with a team of lawyers, before submitting the lawsuit file to the South Jakarta District Court.
"We will file it as soon as possible," Teguh said, without giving the exact date.
Teguh also added that another group from Jakarta branch was planning to do the same.
"But they have their own team of lawyers," Teguh said.
The planned lawsuit is the latest attempt carried out by Sarijaya customers to get their money back given the slow progress in finding out about the fate of their funds, allegedly swindled by Sarijaya president commissioner Herman Ramli.
Herman, who is now in police custody, has allegedly misappropriated customers funds of up to Rp 245 billion (US$23.52 million), leaving Sarijaya with a severe liquidity problem, whilst having dealt a heavy blow on their defrauded customers.
The case created panic among Sarijaya customers, as they did not know what had happened to their investments.
A team from Bapepam and IDX later on announced that only customers who had assets in the form of shares could get their assets back, while the customers who had assets only in the form of cash were still left in dark, waiting for a verification process which could apparently only be done after the police concluded their investigations.
Against these uncertainties, the customers have been trying to do all they could do to get their money back, ranging from requesting help from the IDX, to asking solutions from the members of House of Representatives, to organizing a series of street demonstrations.
But all of these moves have so far proved fruitless.
"This (lawsuit) is our last shot, we hope that when we win the case, the court will order the stock market authorities to pay the losses and we can get our money back," Teguh said.
He added that Bapepam and IDX must also take the responsibility in the case, as they failed to give an early warning to the market.
On Jan. 6, the IDX authority suspended Sarijaya from trading following a devastating drop in its adjusted net working capital to a level of minus Rp 5 trillion, far below the minium of positive Rp 25 billion required by financial regulations.
Responding to this, IDX president director Erry Firmansyah called on Sarijaya customers on Thursday to look at the case very carefully before going to court, saying that the real culprit in this case was none other than Herman (who was already in jail) and not the IDX or Bapepam.
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