T

he Attorney General’s Office (AGO) has made few achievements in the war on graft under the leadership of Attorney General HM Prasetyo, a watchdog says.

The Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said in its report that the AGO under Prasetyo, who was appointed by President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo on Nov. 20, 2014, had sluggishly handled graft cases.

From November 2014 to October 2016, the AGO handled a total of 24 corruption cases involving 79 suspects that had allegedly caused state losses of up to Rp 1.5 trillion (US$111 million), the ICW said. However, only eight of the
cases had been brought to court for prosecution.

The investigation into the alleged graft case implicating telecommunications company PT Mobile-8 Telecom (Mobile-8/Fren), for instance, was launched in October last year, yet the AGO had yet to name a single suspect in the case until today.

One of the reasons investigations into the graft cases had been sluggish is that the AGO was not being transparent, leaving most of the public in the dark about the progress of the cases they were handling, according to the ICW.

“There is no database on graft investigations that can be accessed by the public. [Prasetyo] should have been able to instruct his officers to upload details of the cases to the internet for people to see,” ICW investigator Wana Alamsyah told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

To boost public trust in the AGO, Prasetyo should be able to explain to the public why some graft cases are being left in limbo, ICW legal researcher Aradilla Caesar said.

“It’s regrettable that [Prasetyo] has never explained the situation. This is related to public trust in the AGO,” Wana lamented.

In its report, the ICW also highlighted the inconsistencies and disparities of sentence demands imposed on graft defendants.

In several cases, graft defendants who allegedly caused a huge amount of state losses received the same sentence demands as those who allegedly caused state losses of much fewer amounts, it said.

The brother of former Banten governor Ratu Atut Chosiyah, Tubagus Chaeri Wardana, for example, was found guilty of corruption that caused state losses of Rp 9.6 billion. However, the junior prosecutor from the AGO demanded that he be sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Aradilla said all prosecutors should refer to the prosecution guidelines of graft cases set under the AGO, which outlines the types of punishments in accordance with the state losses caused by the defendants.

But in reality, he added, most prosecutors tended to ignore it.

“Since the guidelines were published through the Attorney General’s regulation, [Prasetyo] should ensure that the guidelines are being obeyed by the prosecutors. If not, it could serve as a bad precedent for the future,” Aradilla said.

Prasetyo, a former NasDem Party politician, played down ICW’s criticism, saying that his office would not be bothered by the damning assessment by the graft watchdog.

“It does not matter what the assessment is. I can assure you that the prosecutor’s office will continue to play its role,” Prasetyo said.