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s reports of vote-buying and money politics tied to the Golkar Party begin to make the rounds ahead of the party'€™s upcoming congress to elect a new chairman, party leaders have pledged to lay out tough ground rules to keep the contest clean and free from corruption.

Party chairman Aburizal Bakrie said on Friday that candidates would be disqualified if there was enough evidence to prove their complicity in dirty tricks.

'€œI want this congress to be clean. But honestly, sometimes it is hard to prove such allegations,'€ Aburizal said during a meeting with the party'€™s many organizations in Jakarta on Friday.

To curb any form of vote-buying, Aburizal said that the congress steering committee would devise a mechanism to better screen candidates. One such measure includes eliminating the requirement for candidates to submit letters of endorsement from the party'€™s regional branches.

During the 2014 Bali National Congress, candidates running for Golkar'€™s top post needed to get 30 percent of 529 votes from regional branch leaders nationwide in order to join the race. The only way a candidate could apply for the leadership contest was by collecting endorsement letters from provincial and regency branch leaders.

Aburizal won the vote by a landslide, leading his rivals to claim that the vote had been rigged. Shortly thereafter, current deputy chairman Agung Laksono held another congress that ended up choosing him as the party leader, a development that set into motion a year-long leadership dispute that is expected to be resolved in the upcoming congress.

Agung, who was also present in Friday'€™s meeting, said he was surprised by reports of vote-buying.

Agung claimed to have received reports about such practices from regional branch executives set to participate in the congress. '€œThat'€™s why I asked for the Corruption Eradication Commission [KPK] to monitor the congress from the very beginning,'€ he said.

The KPK previously warned of possible vote-buying in the lead-up to the upcoming congress, though the anti-graft organization has no plan to monitor the Golkar congress, which is expected to take place in April.

'€œNo such talks have taken place because this is the realm of politics,'€ KPK spokesperson Yuyuk Andriati told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

Earlier this month, senior Golkar politician Nurdin Halid said that there was at least one candidate running for the party chairmanship who was involved in money politics.

Nurdin claimed that an unnamed party branch leader from North Sulawesi had claimed to have been approached by a candidate who promised the regional party executive S$10,000 (US$7,107) in exchange for an endorsement in the leadership race.

Nurdin said he was unable to name either party involved, but claimed that he had obtained a recording of the confession, a letter of endorsement and a chronology of the incident.

Meanwhile, Golkar deputy treasurer Bambang Soesatyo, who backed the candidacy of current House of Representatives Speaker Ade Komaruddin, claimed to have also heard rumors of vote-buying ahead of the congress, but maintained that Ade was not involved in the dirty tactics.

Meanwhile, Golkar politician Indra Bambang Utoyo blamed the ongoing conflict within the party on the practice of money politics.

'€œGolkar has become really pragmatic. Everything is becoming transactional. There is no idealism anymore. Selecting gubernatorial candidates, regents and lawmakers, all involves [transactional politics],'€ he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.