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outh Jakarta District Court ordered the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) on Tuesday to release four of PT Chevron Pacific Indonesia (CPI) employees, who had been named suspects in an alleged corruption case, due to lack of evidence to support their detention.

At four separate trial hearings, which were held simultaneously on Tuesday, each pre-trial judge for each of the four suspects — identified only by their initials BAF, ER, K and W — reached the same decision to grant several of their legal complaints.

Judge Suko Harsono, who heard BAF’s case, ordered prosecutors to revoke his arrest “immediately”, maintaining that the AGO had “failed to present sufficient evidence to support the suspect’s detention”.

“However, the court cannot grant the plaintiff’s wish demanding the AGO to call off its investigation into the case, as that was not within the scope of what was to be decided in these preliminary hearings,” he said in the verdict.

CPI’s legal counsel, Todung Mulya Lubis, said after the hearing that the court’s decisions showed that AGO prosecutors had abused their power by arresting the suspects without a clear legal basis.

In early November, the four filed a legal request to the court to challenge their detention. The four Chevron staffers were detained for a total of 60 days, which included two extensions, amid the ongoing investigation into their case. Last Friday, the AGO had obtained permission from the same court to extend the workers’ detention, yet again, for another 30 days starting from Sunday.

The AGO’s investigation surrounds CPI’s environmental bio-remediation program from 2003 to 2011 at the firm’s oil and gas field in Riau, which was part of the company’s production sharing contract.

In March, the AGO accused CPI of appointing PT Green Planet Indonesia and PT Sumigita Jaya, neither of which, according to the AGO, were certified to undertake waste treatment work, to implement the program. Therefore, the AGO considered the project to be a fabrication and claimed it had caused state losses amounting to Rp 200 billion (US$20.8 million).

Upon further investigations, the AGO changed its stance, saying that while the bio-remediation program did in fact exist, it had failed to achieve its purpose, as evidenced by the existence of waste in the area where the project was carried out.

Last November, the AGO said it had received an audit report from the Development Finance Comptroller (BPKP) saying the state had lost around Rp 100 billion from the enterprise.

Separately, Deputy Attorney General Darmono told The Jakarta Post in a text message that prosecutors would continue to investigate the case despite the court’s decision.