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High time to prosecute corporate crime
Many legal scholars thought the barrier to prosecuting corporate criminal offenses was the rusty Indonesian Criminal Code (ICC), which is silent on this mechanism.
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Many legal scholars thought the barrier to prosecuting corporate criminal offenses was the rusty Indonesian Criminal Code (ICC), which is silent on this mechanism. (Shutterstock/File)
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nticorruption watchdog Transparency International Indonesia (TII) recently published the Corruption Perception Index (CPI) 2016, which ranked Indonesia 90th out of 176 countries, on par with Colombia, Morocco and Liberia.
A drop from the 88th position in the previous year demonstrates that the fight against corruption is going nowhere. A survey conducted by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) indicates that more than 90 percent of corruption cases prosecuted by the KPK involve perpetrators from the private sector as the bribe payers.
Bureaucratic red-tape is one of the causes of bribery, which is carried out to speed up licensing procedures and the award of business contracts or tenders. TII’s Bribe Payers Index 2011 ranked Indonesia in 25th place out of 28 countries, third from the bottom.
In this report, TII interviewed 3,016 heads of multinational and domestic companies in Indonesia who admitted committing bribery to be able to operate its business.
Ernst and Young’s Global Fraud Survey 2012 revealed that 60 percent of Indonesian respondents believed that it was acceptable to bribe authorities to secure business opportunities.
As such it is no surprise that one of the deputy speakers of the House of Representatives declared corruption as the “oil” that keeps the country running. This reflects TII’s 2017 Global Corruption Barometer, which listed the House as the nation’s most corrupt institution.
Since its inception in 2002, the KPK has never prosecuted a single corporation in a corruption case. Even though article 1 (3) of Law No. 31/1999 on corruption clearly stipulates that the term “whoever” includes corporation. As comparison the United Kingdom and United States have implemented criminal liability against corporation through the UK Bribery Act and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).
