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Robert Tantular gets harsher sentence
The Supreme Court on Monday slapped a heavier jail sentence on former Bank Century owner Robert Tantular, who the court said was found guilty of committing a number of banking crimes
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T
he Supreme Court on Monday slapped a heavier jail sentence on former Bank Century owner Robert Tantular, who the court said was found guilty of committing a number of banking crimes.
Robert was sentenced to nine years in prison and ordered to pay a fine of Rp 100 billion (US$11 million), justice Mansur Kartayasa said as quoted by tempointeraktif.com on Monday.
A Jakarta district court initially convicted him of four years in prison and ordered him to pay Rp 50 billion in fines.
The capital’s high court upheld the verdict, raising the jail term to five and a half years.
In their verdict, a panel of judges said that Tantular was guilty of committing three banking crimes.
The defendant, they said, was culpable for illegally transferring a US$18 million deposit owned by Boedi Sampoerna and PT Lancar Sampoerna Lestari from Bank Century’s Kertajaya branch in Surabaya, East Java, to the bank’s Senayan branch in Jakarta.
Robert also breached the banking law when he and the bank’s president director, Hermanus Hasan Muslim, imprudently channeled Rp 121.3 billion and Rp 60 billion loans to PT Wibowo Wadah Rejeki and PT Accent Investment Indonesia respectively.
He was also accused of interfering in the operation of the bank by signing two documents to raise capital and seek new investors for the then ailing bank.
The judges, headed by Kartayasa, argued the defendant deserved a heavy sentence because his crimes had caused significant losses to depositors and the state.
The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) questioned Robert in its investigation into possible fraud in the disbursement of the Rp 6.76 trillion ($716 million) bailout of Bank Century as part of an effort to weather the global financial crisis in 2008.
The bailout prompted a House of Representatives’ inquiry that implicated Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati and then Bank Indonesia governor Boediono, who authorized the flawed bailout. The KPK is still investigating the case.
