Imagine your bank manager calling to say that your credit card limit has been raised to US$670 million. How would you spend it?

You could pay for a whole of lot of schooling for children whose parents have been struggling to come up with the money to pay for books, uniforms and other hidden costs of the supposedly free national education system. Priceless.

You could give scholarships to cover the whole four-year tuition fees for 67,000 undergrads, and help Indonesia become more globally competitive-Priceless.

You could build hospitals with decent facilities in so many towns across the country and provide inexpensive healthcare to millions of people. Priceless.

If you are concerned about national defense, that kind of money could be used to upgrade Indonesia's outdated air radar system, or purchase a few submarines to defend our waters, or a few fighter jets to protect our skies-Priceless.

If it's your own private money and you are running for election, that kind of money comes handy to bankroll your campaign. It's priceless, though selfish.

If it's other people's money to blow, you could fly to Vegas, have a night on the town and gamble away all the money. That is immoral, although you come back smiling.

It is also immoral for the government to spend that kind of taxpayers' money on a few people when there are so many more competing needs to fix this nation, from helping the poor, improving education and health services, to building economic infrastructure and defense capabilities.

Whatever legal or economic pretexts the government gives for its decision to bail out Bank Century at the obscene cost of Rp 6.7 trillion, the issue essentially comes down to a case of protecting the interests of a handful of people - the bank owners and depositors - while depriving millions of others who would have found much better uses for that money.

From a moral standpoint, this is simply indefensible.

Bank Indonesia (the central bank) and the Finance Ministry, which jointly made the decision in November, say they have complied with all the legal protocols for bailing out troubled banks. They argue that the decision was taken because they strongly believed if Century was allowed to collapse, it would have triggered massive runs on 23 other similar-sized banks that were also experiencing severe liquidity problems.

That raised the prospect of undermining public confidence in the banking system. This was when the global economy was entering into a recession, with banks in the US and elsewhere collapsing. There was a need to shore up public confidence.

What they didn't know then was that the bailout cost would soar more than tenfold from the original estimate of Rp 600 billion.

If they knew then what they know now, they probably would not have made the decision, especially now they have since learned that the bank owners had been helping themselves to the money before they fled the country, leaving in their wake huge debts for the government, as the new owner of the bank, to pay.

Many now believe the fear of a massive rush had been widely exaggerated. Others say there could be other factors at play that the monetary authorities are not revealing, including the possibility of pressure being brought to bear from big depositors who stood to lose a lot of money if Century collapsed.

Hence the investigation that is being launched by the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK) and the possibility of the anticorruption commission, the KPK, being brought in to see if there had been any impropriety in the decision making process.

And then there is the political twist to this episode, with outgoing Vice President Jusuf Kalla taking a shot at Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and the central bank governor at the time, Boediono, for their poorly thought-out decision.

For Kalla, who lost his presidential bid in the July election, this is his parting shot to a five-year partnership with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The President has stayed out of the fray, leaving Sri Mulyani virtually by herself to defend against the attacks from Kalla and others. Boediono, now the vice-president-elect, has also remained silent about his role in the Bank Century scam.

The debate about the Bank Century bailout will no doubt continue, revolving as it does around four dimensions: legal, banking, criminal and political.

But no one is addressing the real big question that is in the minds of many people on the streets: Shouldn't someone take the moral responsibility for squandering so much taxpayer money?

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