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Entire flipping rotten legislature charged with graft
The Bogor Prosecutor’s Office is going after all 45 former members of the 1999-2004 municipal council for embezzling a total of Rp 6
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he Bogor Prosecutor’s Office is going after all 45 former members of the 1999-2004 municipal council for embezzling a total of Rp 6.2 billion (US$652,631) from the 2002 budget.
The money, part of the budget’s supplementary fund, was distributed among the councilors based on rank, prosecutors allege.
Chief prosecutor Andi Muhammad Taufik said former council speaker Mochamad Sahid received the biggest cut, pocketing Rp 185 million.
“The deputy speaker got Rp 155 million and other councilors got Rp 122 million,” he added.
Twenty of the former councilors were arrested Wednesday, while prosecutors are waiting for warrants to arrest those still serving in the council or in the municipality administration.
Prosecutors will need presidential permission to go after former councilor Ahmad Ru’yat, who is the deputy mayor. They will likewise need West Java Governor Ahmad Heryawan’s say-so to go after four others still in the municipal council.
Prosecutors have stayed the arrests of 10 ex-councilors after they promised to return what they could of the money, but have forbade them from leaving the city.
Andi said his office would not detain the 10 because its main target was to recover as much money as possible.
“I demanded they return 80 percent of the money. The threat of arrest was enough for them,” he said.
He added the money was being deposited in a bank and would be transferred to the state coffers once all the prosecutions were complete.
The remaining ex-councilors are either servicemen, and thus will be tried by the military, or have died.
Ex-councilor Beni Mahyudin, who was arrested Wednesday, proclaimed his innocence and said the money had been doled out according to procedure.
“We did the budgeting process with the administration, the fund was audited at the end of the year by the audit agency, and no complaints were filed at the time,” he said.
“So what went wrong?”
He also questioned the demand to return 80 percent of the money, saying there was no legal basis for it.
The law on corruption stipulates a full return of embezzled money and a criminal trial.
