The former head of the Presidential Working Unit for Reform Program Management (UKP3R), Marsilam Simanjuntak, says his presence at last year’s meeting to bail out Bank Century was not under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s orders.
“The President did not send me nor order me to attend the meeting. I also never reported the matter to the President, either before or after the meeting,” he said during questioning with the House of Representatives’ inquiry committee on the Bank Century case in Jakarta on Monday.
Marsilam also stressed his presence in the meeting, dated Nov. 21, 2008, was due to an invitation from the then Financial System Stability Committee (KSSK) secretary, Raden Pardede, and in his capacity as an expert.
Furthermore, Marsilam also said there was nothing special about his presence as the UKP3R had always been set as the working partner for the KSSK, a grouping of the Finance Ministry and Bank Indonesia.
“So it really does not matter whether I attended the meeting as the head of UKP3R or the source. I attended the meeting as both [the UKP3R head and as an expert].”
Marsilam’s presence during the meeting was made known when one of the committee members, Bambang Soesatyo from the Golkar Party, claimed he had a transcript that might have contained a conversation between Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and former Bank Century owner Robert Tantular.
It was then revealed that the voice in the transcript did not belong to Robert but to Marsilam.
Realizing the mistake on the identification of Robert in the transcript, legislators then tried to link Marsilam’s presence with the possibility of Yudhoyono’s interference over the decision to salvage Bank Century using a bailout of Rp 6.76 trillion (US$716 million), more than tenfold the original estimation.
During previous inquiries, Mul-yani and former Bank Indonesia governor Boediono, the current Vice President, had also said that Marsilam was invited in his capacity as an expert, particularly on the legal aspects.
On Monday morning, the committee also grilled the former taxation office chief and interim Bank Indonesia governor, Darmin Nasution.
Darmin was questioned because he attended the KSSK meeting in his role as one of the commissioners at the Deposit Insurance Corporation (LPS), an institution whose funds were then used to inject fiscal aid into Bank Century.
The inquiry on Darmin was mostly about his opinion as to whether he deemed that Bank Century possessed a systematic threat to the country’s banking system or not.
Darmin Nasution told the committee that the debate over the potential systematic threat of Bank Century was relevant during that time, which was right in the middle of the global financial crisis.
Darmin then said the decision to save Bank Century was made as a preventive measure to save the country’s economy amid the global financial crisis.
“From a micro point of view, Bank Century was not a systematically threatening bank,” he said.
“However, Boediono reasoned we must put safety first amid the global crisis.”
