T

he South Jakarta District Court overturned on Tuesday the suspect status of former state-owned enterprises minister Dahlan Iskan in a high-profile graft case that was estimated to have caused the state billions of rupiah in losses.

Judge Lendriaty Janis, sitting alone, said that naming Dahlan a suspect was illegitimate as the Jakarta Prosecutor'€™s Office did not have enough evidence to prove his alleged role in rigging the procurement of electricity transformers worth more than Rp 1.3 trillion (US$96.4 million) for state electricity firm PLN in 2009.

'€œWe accept the applicant'€™s request to declare that the sprindik [letter ordering the start of an investigation] published on June 5 is illegitimate and has no legal basis,'€ Lendriaty said while reading the verdict.

She said that based on the evidence presented by the prosecutors, Dahlan, a former president director of PLN, had been named a suspect based only on the statements of 15 other suspects in the case.

'€œThe naming of the suspect seems subjective because it was not preceded by enough evidence and witness statements,'€ Lendriaty said.

Apart from Dahlan, the prosecutors had slapped corruption charges on 15 PLN officials in the case.

The Jakarta Prosecutor'€™s Office found that the state lost Rp 33 billion as the result of two malfunctioning central electricity transformers procured by PLN and investigators believe that there were a total of 13 unusable central electricity transformers that may have caused even greater losses to the state.

Dahlan'€™s lawyer, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, said the judge'€™s ruling meant that the Jakarta Prosecutor'€™s Office could no longer continue its investigation into Dahlan.

'€œThe judge decided to grant [Dahlan'€™s] request and she also declared that naming him a suspect was illegitimate and any continuation [of the investigation] since naming him was illegitimate. This means that from today [Tuesday], the Jakarta Prosecutor'€™s Office can no longer do anything because the ruling is final and binding,'€ he said after the court hearing.

Separately, Jakarta Prosecutor'€™s Office spokesman Waluyo said prosecutors would examine the judge'€™s ruling before they decided how to continue as the investigators believed they had the two pieces of evidence to name Dahlan a suspect.

'€œWe will revise what was seen [by the judge] as a mistake. We will not stand down. We will charge anyone responsible in the electricity transformers case,'€ he said.

Although the electricity transformers procurement case is the only one in which Dahlan has been named a suspect, the media mogul has also been questioned as a witness in several other cases by the Attorney General'€™s Office (AGO) and the National Police.

The AGO has named two suspects '€” president director of PT Sarimas Ahmadi Pratama, Dasep Ahmadi, and State-Owned Enterprises Ministry official, Agus Suherman '€” in an electric-car procurement case that allegedly occurred in the run up to the 2013 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit held in Bali. The 16 vehicles worth up to Rp 32 billion were never used during the summit due to technical problems and were later donated to state universities.

Despite the South Jakarta District Court'€™s decision, AGO spokesman Tony T. Spontana said the AGO would continue its investigation. '€œThe electric-car procurement case will continue as it has no connection to the pretrial motion,'€ he said.

Tony said there was still a chance that the investigators from the Jakarta Prosecutor'€™s Office would publish a new sprindik and continue the case against Dahlan.