T

he Attorney General’s Office (AGO) is at odds with data presented by Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) in their latest report on this year’s corruption case court verdicts.

The report measures the court’s efficacy in dealing with corruption cases from January to July 10, 2010. It concluded that 54.82 percent of the 166 defendants implicated in 103 cases had been acquitted by the courts. ICW compiled the incomplete data from media reports.

The report also records that the average prison time for those found guilty of corruption is slightly above one year, with no one sentenced to more than 10 years.

“I question the source and accuracy of their data” said the AGO spokesman, Babul Khoir Harahap.

Babul added the ICW report did not tally with data from the attorney general’s special crimes unit.

“The special crimes unit does not record such high figures for acquittals of the accused,” he said. “The number of cases reported by the ICW does not match ours either.”

Based on the attorney general’s data, he said, the state court only handed down seven acquittals out of the 741 corruption cases in this year’s first semester. The courts, from the district, and high court to the Supreme Court, recovered Rp 123.7 billion (US$ 13.73 million) in state finances through these cases.

Babul invited the public to compare the watchdog data to that from the attorney general, adding the latter was “reliable since it comes from a formal state institution”.

Babul, however, did not produce data from the office’s general crime unit. Corruption cases are usually handled by a special crime unit, but some cases went to the general crime unit. The case of low-ranking tax officer Gayus Tambunan, for example, was handled by the latter. Gayus, accused of money laundering, was acquitted by Tangerang District Court in March.

Babul earlier said prosecutor Cirus Sinaga’s decision to send the case to the general crime unit was “not wrong and by the book”.

Donal Fariz, an ICW researcher, said they would not publish a report that lacked accuracy and validity.

“We will never make claims without solid data,” he said, adding that the media was ICW’s primary source of data, besides their network of colleagues spread out in various districts across the country.

“We document and tabulate verdicts on corruption cases reported by the local and national media, which usually carry regular updates on court processes across Indonesia,” he told The Jakarta Post.

“We also link up with our network of partners who supply us with information on several cases and verdicts at the local level,” he said. “For example, we cooperate with the legal aid services in Padang.

He added that a “multi-layered checking process” was performed on the data they received from the media to ensure accuracy.

“If we find seemingly doubtful information from the media, we will ask our colleagues at the local level to confirm the data,” he said.

According to him, collecting the information that the media offered was far easier and faster than requesting data from government institutions, which required them to undergo complex bureaucratic processes.

“This complication would have made it impossible for us to move quickly to produce a timely report for the first semester of 2010,” he said, adding that the process could take months.

“We would end up waiting in uncertainty, which we don’t want to be doing,” he said. (gzl)