UN initiative could see Soeharto in hot water
Tony Hotland, The Jakarta Post, New York

Indonesia may become part of an initiative launched Monday by the United Nations to help recover stolen funds embezzled to other countries, the Foreign Ministry said.

The UN's Drugs and Crime arm is working with the World Bank on the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative, which could see former president Soeharto's crimes fully uncovered.

The former president's name tops the 10 most notorious cases quoted in a UN document.

"To be quoted in a UN document is profound, sort of an acknowledgement," said Arif Havas Oegroseno, director of Political, Security and Territorial Treaties at the Foreign Ministry before the launch of the project.

"We will meet with the World Bank on Sept. 21 in Washington and we'll see what kind of program (under the initiative) suits our needs."

The asset recovery team at the Attorney General's Office (AGO) is currently making efforts to trace and return stolen funds stashed in several developed nations including Britain, Switzerland and Singapore.

The AGO's efforts are aimed at fugitives alleged to have embezzled money from the state coffers, including those implicated in the disbursement of trillions of rupiah under the Bank Indonesia's Liquidation Support program following the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

A domestic civil trial is set to commence next Monday against Soeharto and his Supersemar Foundation, which will see the AGO demand the return of around Rp 15 trillion (over US$1.5 billion).

In May last year, the AGO dropped criminal charges against the 86-year-old after concluding he was too ill to face trial.

The AGO is also pursuing $50 million deposited in a bank account in the Guernsey Islands by Soeharto's son Hutomo Mandala Putra. The account was frozen by the Royal Guernsey Court in Britain.

The UN's top 10 most wanted list was compiled by Transparency International and accompanying documents allege Soeharto to have embezzled between $15- and $35 billion from 1967 to 1998.

Soeharto's figure exceeds the list's runner-up, Ferdinand Marcos, former president of the Phillipines, who is earmarked to have stolen between $5- and $10 billion between 1972 and 1986.

Soeharto won last week a case against Time magazine over an article published in May 1999 alleging he had stashed a massive amount of money abroad.

The magazine said it had traced some $15 billion in wealth accumulated by his family in 11 countries.

The magazine also documented more than $73 billion in revenues and assets passed through the Soeharto family's hands during his tenure.

Actions under the UN-World Bank asset recovery initiative include strengthening prosecuting agencies, bringing financial centers into compliance with anti-money laundering legislations, assisting asset recovery by developing nations with grants and legal counseling, facilitating cooperation between two countries, and ensuring the use of recovered assets go to development purposes.

Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said governments should act fast once stolen assets had been detected, before the funds disappeared into other money laundering ventures.

"Rich countries and financial jurisdictions needed to be confronted with the fact that harboring stolen goods is a crime," Costa said.

Indonesia has enjoyed little success regaining state money believed to have been laundered in Singapore. The funds have not been ratified the UN Convention against Corruption.

But Costa said the new initiative would work only where bilateral agreements on extradition were in place, which is not the case between Indonesia and Singapore.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailnation...id=20070919.H01

Or is corruption a symptom rather than a cause of some of its problems?

Human are all sinner by nature who need God's guidance.
In most cases, the richer countries are just better in hiding their corruption and the poorer countries have no other choice.
What do you think started the finance disaster that we are facing today?

You said richer countries are just better in hiding their corruption and the poorer countries have no other choice.

Well, please allow me to correct your thoughts

1. There are many corruptions in the world.

All countries have many corruptors. However, in richer/modern countries, those corruptors are severely punished by their government. As a result, the severety of corruptions in modern countries is less than in poorer countries.

Why?

It is because corruptors in poorer country, such as Indon, are not severely punished by our government. Then, more and more people become corruptors because they are not afraid of the punishment. As a result, my country Indon is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

2. You said that modern countries started the economic crisis, nowadays.

Actually, you are wrong again

It is not many modern countries who started the crisis, but just one, United States of America. However, the effect spread all over the word.

And, the crisis in USA did not come from corruptions, but from GREED

Many real estate companies/Banks sold houses to low income people who have no good ability to submit the monthly payments. Those companies/Banks thought they can easily take back the houses, once the buyer cannot pay the money. If just few buyers cannot pay the money, it is okay. The strength of US's economy will easily absorb the problems. But, if too many people cannot pay the money and it happens in the long term, the Banks will collapse. It is called Subprime Mortgage. You sold housings to unqualified buyers.

So, it is clear the crisis was not caused by corruptions, but by GREED in USA

CORRUPTION means you take something which doesn't belong to you. Corruptors are thieves

But, Greed is not stealing something which doesn't belong to you. There are some loop holes in the US economic system exploited by greedy people. Those people were not wrong, but too greedy.

Do you see the difference, comrade?

A Voyage Into the Darkness of Indonesian Corruption

by Angela Dewan
Asia Sentinel
18 JANUARY 2011

The Travels of Taxman Tambunan

If Jonathan Swift had written a satire on corruption in Indonesia, he couldn’t have imagined a more farcical plot than that involving Gayus Tambunan. In just eight months, the detained civil servant, a mid-level tax official, managed to bribe his way out of prison 68 times, fly to at least three other countries in a dubious disguise and even bribe his way out of bribery charges.

A frustrated President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono Monday demanded an end to the affair and issued orders to look into 149 companies said to have benefited from the tax official’s services, including as much as US$1 billion in taxes allegedly evaded by companies controlled by Aburizal Bakrie, the head of the Golkar political party and one of Indonesia’s richest businessmen. It is a story that illustrates how deeply corruption reaches into the Indonesian government, including the national police, the courts, the prosecutor’s office, the immigration department, the prison system, the tax agency and others. It has also tarnished Yudhoyono’s reputation as a reformer.

Tambunan, back in jail, presumably for a long stretch, was so audacious in his antics that he captivated and even impressed Indonesians, who have dubbed him SuperGayus in local media – one newspaper even named him Man of the Year.

After several secret jaunts abroad, Tambunan was finally busted when a photojournalist covering an international tennis tournament in Bali snapped the slippery 31-year-old in the audience sporting an unconvincing wig of lustrous black locks and thick-rimmed glasses.

Tambunan was supposed to be sitting in a police cell awaiting trial for accepting Rp28 billion (US$3 million) in bribes to doctor the tax returns of three companies linked to the Bakrie Group. He denied for weeks that the photo depicted him. “I prefer golf,” was his sole response to reporters’ allegations outside the courtroom.

When he finally admitted what everyone could see, he showed little understanding that bribing his way out of prison, hopping on a plane to a resort island and checking into an upmarket hotel with family on illegally obtained money was wrong.

“I had never expected that my leave would trigger such a major controversy,” he said.

“I have been so stressed since being detained and I thought I would take a little vacation because I also saw that several other high-profile detainees were allowed to leave.”

It wasn’t long before the nation found out that it wasn’t the first time Tambunan had been outside the prison walls. After images of him in disguise appeared in the media, a reader of the Kompas daily newspaper wrote a letter to the editor saying she had spotted the same man on a flight to Singapore in September.

It turned out that the mop-headed, bespectacled man had a name, Sony Laksono, and his very own forged passport. Tambunan took romps to China, Singapore and Malaysia during his supposed detention.

It seems he will not be worming his way out of prison this time although he is certainly still trying. Last week, the disgraced tax official made one last attempt to save himself – and his country – from corruption. In his final address to the South Jakarta District Court, where he faces 20 years’ imprisonment, Tambunan offered an unsavory plea-bargain.

“Make me an expert assistant to the National Police chief, the attorney general or the KPK [Corruption Eradication Commission] chairman, and I promise within two years Indonesia will be clean,” he said. “I will help net the big fish.”

The suggestion has been met with ridicule. What the case has exposed, however, that rules and regulations can be bent every which way with money and bargaining chips to pervert everyday life in Indonesia. The case has become much larger than Tambunan himself, involving vast amounts of money and corrupt players on all fronts.

A prison warden and guards, for example, were bribed to let Tambunan out of his cell; a TV news program allegedly paid a man to pose as a case broker for corrupt national police; police officers took bribes to not search Tambunan’s house for evidence; a businessman bribed a police officer with a Harley Davidson motorcycle in exchange for dropping him as suspect in the case; immigration officials are being questioned over a passport forgery syndicate; and, most disturbing, prosecutors and a judge allegedly accepted billions of rupiah to reduce Tambunan’s money-laundering and graft charges to embezzlement and then acquit him.

Sink your fishing line anywhere in the putrid pond and you will no doubt come up with a catch. And, as Tambunan himself pointed out, there are indeed bigger fish to fry although given Indonesia’s record, there is precious little evidence that any additional frying will be done.

The biggest fish to bite so far is Bahasyim Assifie, former head of investigations for the Jakarta Tax Office tax directorate, who is on trial for graft after Rp932 billion was found in various family bank accounts. When Assifie was put on trial, the jokes about SuperTambunan began to subside – it became clear that that there was a lot more to this case than Rp28 billion, a comical wig and pair of glasses, and that the corrupt tax mafia was very real.

Just as real is the judicial mafia. Allowing the corrupt judiciary to deal with the corrupt tax office has proven a waste of time, and, ironically, taxpayers’ money.

Almost weekly, another suspect is implicated in this case, which began in 2009 when the Rp28 billion was found in Tambunan’s local bank account. As the case becomes more convoluted, it further ridicules Indonesia’s democracy and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, who has won two presidential terms on a fervent corruption-fighting platform.

Yudhoyono, Indonesia’s first democratically elected leader, won his people’s approval by backing the effective anti-graft body, the KPK, which prosecuted some of the nation’s most senior corrupt officials. But the former general appears to have lost his zeal for reform when his second presidential term began in 2009.

“In the early stages of Yudhoyono’s second term, he publicly said that the KPK had too much power and that the KPK must not go unchecked,” Erry Riyana Hardjapamekas, a former KPK commissioner, told Asia Sentinel. “But everybody knows that even the public can check the KPK’s performance, and the KPK has its own internal controls.”

Why Yudhoyono turned on the KPK is not exactly known, but it seems no coincidence that he soured at the same time his government became mired in a Rp6.7 trillion bank bailout scandal, in which he lost his best minister and right-hand woman, then-Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati.

With plans to reform Indonesia’s frail tax system, Sri Mulyani went head-to-head with Bakrie, who in a recent Financial Times story was called “Indonesia’s shadow president.” His family owns the Bakrie Group, to which the three companies accused of bribing Tambunan to cook their tax records are linked.

With law enforcers who have proven themselves unreliable, hope is now pegged on the KPK, which is cooperating with police and has been called on by activists to take over the case.

But after a number of attempts by the corrupt elite and the police to weaken the KPK since 2009, it is unclear whether the KPK has retained enough clout to take on the tax mafia and its allies.

While no one is interested in Tambunan’s offer to clean up Indonesia, the one figure that could step in and make a difference is the president – if he has now indeed come out of hiding to realign himself with the KPK.

“He always says he cannot interfere in the legal process,” said Hardjapamekas, the former KPK commissioner. “But as head of state, the police and others are under his command. It’s not about interfering but controlling and checking that subordinates follow the due process of law.”

A democratic country .... but with many of corruptors + cleptocracy .... What's wrong with this beautiful country? .....

I would not disagree with you.
I am using corruption of human heart as the source of corruption, greed, stealing, killings.....................and my main point to the thread is that Indonesia definitely is not the only exception.

Anyone here dare to say that he or she never lies or cheats? Given the temptation, we human all have the potential to be part of doing wrong.