Graft probe moves at snail's pace in Cilacap

Agus Maryono ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Cilacap   |  Sat, 07/04/2009 1:04 PM  |  The Archipelago

A three-month marathon of investigations into an alleged graft case involving Cilacap regency administration has yet to produce any suspect officials, despite police promising to do so three weeks ago.

Regardless of the fact that at least 124 staff members of the subdistrict and district administration have been questioned, no officials in the regency administration (whose regent has also been detained by Central Java Prosecutors' Office in a separate graft case) have been named suspects.

After three months of investigations, the only suspect named has been a business partner in a computer procurement project whose company was apparently fictitious.

"We have identified several suspect candidates but will not announce them today.

"We will wait until everything is certain because we have not finished our investigations," Banyumas Regional Police detective and crime unit chief Comr. Syarif Rahman said Friday.

Cilacap regency is under the jurisdiction of the regional police, which also oversees Purbalingga, Banjarnegara and Banyumas regencies.

"We will summon a number of regency administration officials for a hearing before naming a suspect in the case," he said.

Previously Syarif has said his side would organize a summons within a week. However, after more than three weeks, none of the regency administration officials have been summoned for a police hearing.

So far, 103 subdistrict officials and 21 district secretaries, picked randomly from 284 subdistricts and 24 districts in the regency, have been questioned in the investigations, Syarif said.

A random sample was taken, Syarif said, because the number was regarded as sufficient to learn about the corruption case worth Rp 13 billion - claimed to be the biggest graft cast Banyumas Police has handled to date.

From their investigations, police have found more than 10 potential suspects. However, Syarif assured that none were subdistrict heads. Subdistrict heads were just victimized by officials at the regency administration level, he said.

Cilacap's 2008 subdistrict funding allocation (ADD) was found to be problematic because there were indications of structured misappropriation, Syarif said.

Each subdistrict had been allocated Rp 100 million, he said, but in practice this amount was not delivered to subdistricts, with each only receiving Rp 52 million.

"The remaining Rp 48 million was taken by the regency administration, which claimed it was needed for a program to provide Internet access to subdistricts," Syarif said.

And each of the subdistrict was only provided with a com-puter worth only Rp 5 million, Syarif said.

Because of this, a number of subdistricts complained about the project. "*The complaints* eventually reached us and we followed them up," he said.

The investigation had also uncovered fictitious companies used in the procurement of the computers. "Of seven partner companies, six were fictitious."

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