AGO claims to have rescued Rp 4.8 trillion worth of state assets

Dicky Christanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 12/23/2009 9:10 PM

Deputy Attorney General for special crimes Marwan Effendy said the Attorney General’s Office managed to recover Rp 4.8 trillion (US$ 505 million) of state assets, a significant increase on last year’s Rp 2.5 trillion.

“The assets are in the form of money and valuable goods,” Marwan told a press conference held at the AGO on Wednesday.

However, Marwan did not elaborate on whether the state assets had been returned to the state treasury’s account.

Marwan said prosecutors had managed to try more cases in the courts this year.

This year, he added, the prosecutors had investigated 1,533 graft cases,1,292 of them were brought to the court.

The statistics have shown an 18,5 percent of increase since the prosecutors had only been able to examine 1,348 graft cases, of which 1.114 were brought to the courts.

Febri Diansyah from Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said the AGO should not boast publicly because what he had witnessed was actually the other way around.

“There has been a significant decrease of public trust toward the prosecutors integrity and we fail to believe that the AGO has imposed stricter rules to those prosecutors who have violated the regulations so far,” Febri told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday.

People are disenfranchised with the legal authority that has failed to punish its own prosecutors who have been involved in graft, including Wisnu Nugroho, Abdul Hakim Ritonga, Muhammad Salim and Kemas Yahya Rahman.

Attorney General Hendarman Supandji said he acknowledged that many people were still dissatisfied with the prosecutors’ performances.

Hendarman said that he would accelerate an internal reform program within his institution that was by cutting up to 3,000 positions in all divisions.