Legislators, who welcomed their guests — and even those who did not want to see them — were engaged in a war of words. The meeting abruptly stopped after 24 of the 39 host lawmakers voted against the presence of Bibit and Chandra.

Legislators who refused the KPK deputies were from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), the Golkar Party and the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS). They refused to recognize the Attorney General’s prerogative to stop the legal proceedings against Bibit and Chandra over charges of misusing their authority and attempting to extort a businessman.

They argued that Attorney General Basrief Arief’s move to close the Bibit-Chandra case did not automatically mean that the deputies were morally clean because their innocence was not legally proven.      

Basrief stopped the Bibit and Chandra legal proceedings for the “interest of the public” after apparently convincing the authorities that the charges had been engineered by a judicial mafia intent on weakening the KPK.  

The lawmakers’ rejection  was laughable, to say the least, because all five KPK leaders came to the House at the invitation of the legislative body.

Because the incident happened only a few days after the KPK had detained 19 legislators —  mostly from PDI-P and Golkar on charges of receiving illegal gratuities for the 2004 election of Miranda S. Goeltom as Bank Indonesia senior deputy governor — it’s only logical to suspect that the House decision to evict Bibit and Chandra was an  act of retaliation.

Rift between the KPK and the House is well-known. Corrupt lawmakers have become among the KPK’s major targets, and the Corruption Court has sent many lawmakers to jail.  The latest incident has only deepened public distrust in the legislative body and its sincerity when it comes to eradicating graft.

The House has been singled out by Transparency International Indonesia as one of the most corrupt institutions in the Republic.

On the contrary, the KPK has secured strong public support as the most trusted law enforcer, while the Police and the judiciary are loathed for corruption.

***    

The South Jakarta District Court on Wednesday sentenced Bahasyim Assifie, a former senior tax official, to 10 years in jail for money laundering and taking gratuities from a businesswoman. They also fined him Rp 250 million (US$27,700), with the option of serving another three months in jail if he decides not to pay the fine.

Even though the sentence was five years shorter than the term that prosecutors had demanded, the verdict has won an unusually positive response from the public because for the first time the Court used the reversed burden of proof approach in a graft case.

Bahasyim was found guilty of accepting Rp 1 billion gratuity from Kartini Mulyadi in his capacity as head of the tax fraud investigation office in Jakarta      and he failed to prove the legality of his Rp 60.9 billion fortune.

The wonderful thing about the verdict is that Bahasyim will have his money confiscated by the state. Under the conventional technique, the prosecutors were rarely able to prove that the disputed funds came from illegal sources. Normally the chances are that the defendant would be acquitted or receive a lenient sentence and laugh all the way to the bank to withdraw his crooked money.  

Still, the way the police and prosecutors handled Bahasyim case gave the impression that the law enforcers were only joking. They did not follow up facts gathered from the defendant and witnesses who stated that Bahasyim and his wife and daughter were together sitting on more than Rp 1 trillion  fortune gained from questionable sources. His wife and daughter refused to testify on the pretex that the laws do not allow them to stand as witnesses in court.

Calls are mounting for the KPK to step in and investigate the discrepancies, particularly the sources of the disputed funds, Bahasyim’s personal mafia and the legality of the hundreds of billions of rupiah left in Bahasyim’s bank accounts.

 ***

 Following weeks of  trial hearings rocked by unruly demonstrations staged by militant Islamic groups, the Bandung District Court sentenced singer Nazriel “Ariel” Irham on Monday to three-and-a-half years in prison and fined him Rp 250 million for violating the 2008 Pornography Law.

After analyzing forensic evidence, the judges were convinced that it was indeed Ariel and his girlfriend model/TV personality Luna Maya who featured in the sex video, which somehow found its way into cyberspace. Ariel’s trial and sentencing pleased radical Islamic groups who constitute the main proponent of the controversial law on pornography, and has added fuel to the debate about the law, which was allegedly constructed based on Islamic religious doctrine.

Critics have maintained that the trial was misguided, insisting that it was the persons who uploaded and distributed the videos who should stand trial, and not Ariel and Luna, who are but victims because they purportedly did not make the video for public consumption.

The police, prosecutors and judges, however, insist that the law also targets anyone involved in creating the steamy material, regardless of whether it be it for personal or public use.

— Pandaya

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