T

he Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has named former member of the House of Representatives’ budget committee, Wa Ode Nurhayati, a suspect for the second time in less than five months, this time on money-laundering charges.

Wa Ode, a National Mandate Party (PAN) lawmaker who went public with her allegation that the House budgetary committee was a den of corruption, was first charged with bribery surrounding the disbursement of regional transfer funds for the 2010 Infrastructure Development Acceleration Program (PPID).

The KPK announced on Tuesday that Wa Ode was being charged under three articles of the 2010 Anti-Money Laundering Law, two of which carry a maximum of 20 years in jail and a maximum fine of Rp 1 billion.

These latest charges were brought against Wa Ode after KPK investigators dug deeper into her role in the PPID bribery case.

In January, Wa Ode was arrested after the antigraft body named her a suspect in December last year. She was alleged to have accepted Rp 6 billion in kickbacks from businessman Fahd A Rafiq, also a suspect in the case, to expedite the disbursement of PPID funds to three areas in Aceh.

“When we were investigating the PPID case, we traced some illicit money obtained from corruption to her bank account,” KPK spokesman Johan Budi told a press conference on Tuesday.

Johan said the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK) provided details on Wa Ode’s bank transactions.

KPK prosecutors found two pieces of incriminating evidence against Wa Ode a week ago, just after they launched the new probe against her. The KPK also officially named her a suspect around the same time.

Johan said investigators had yet to set a date for questioning Wa Ode but confirmed that they would be extending her detention after it was due to expire.

On Tuesday, KPK investigators questioned House secretary-general Nining Indra Saleh as a witness in the case.

Nining said after the questioning session that the KPK’s investigators had primarily asked her about the House’s administrative matters, including how much Wa Ode earned as a House member and what bank account her salary was paid into.

“No, they did not ask questions related to the money laundering; they only asked basic questions,” she told reporters.

The PPATK’s deputy chairman, Agus Santoso, said the agency immediately relayed information about Wa Ode’s banking activities to the KPK after it discovered suspicious transactions.

Agus provided no details about the suspicious transactions.

Agus lauded the KPK’s move in applying the 2010 Anti-Money Laundering Law against Wa Ode as “significant progress in enforcing the law to tackle corruption”.

By using the law, he added, the KPK might uncover more about the graft case. “That way, anyone who accepted money from illicit sources can be held responsible,” he said.

Wa Ode Nurhayati’s lawyer, her sister Wa Ode Nur Zaenab, said she was not aware of the KPK’s decision to name her client a suspect in the money-laundering case.

She deplored the KPK move, saying that the commission was only “looking for ways to incriminate Wa Ode Nurhayati”.

“It is clear that [Wa Ode Nurhayati] revealed the roles played by others in the PPID case, including the leaders of the House’s budget committee; but they did nothing,” she said.

She said that her client had, in fact, returned the bribery money to the KPK.