Spokesman Adre W. Ginting said after gathering sufficient evidence, the provincial prosecutor’s office had detained five suspects for a period of 20 days from Sept. 26 for further investigation.

Adre said the office’s investigators uncovered fictitious jobs and markups related to procurements in 2017 for the trolley management, smart airport and smart parking systems project, worth Rp 34.2 billion.

Investigators also found that the procurements were not done on time and did not meet the contractual specifications.

The suspects comprise three mid-level employees and one retired employee of airport operator PT Angkasa Pura II, as well as an employee of a project contractor.

All five are being held at detention centers in provincial capital Medan, and face a maximum sentence of 20 years under the Corruption Law for incurring state losses.

Data from Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) show that an average 40 percent of all corruption cases over the four-year period from 2016 to 2019 were related to public procurement.

Kualanamu is the third-largest airport in Indonesia, after Soekarno-Hatta International Airport in Banten and Kertajati International Airport in West Java.

Its location in Deli Serdang regency, which surrounds Medan on the northeastern coast of Sumatra, is deemed more strategic than Soekarno-Hatta, due to its shorter distance to many Asian countries including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and China, as well as destinations in the Middle East and Europe. (dre/ars)