The lenient punishment handed down on former ruling-party politician Angelina Sondakh has drawn criticism from corruption watchdogs who want the public prosecutor and the judges to be investigated regarding the actual motives of the verdict. Angie received only a 4.5-year jail term, which includes her six-month detention period, and a Rp 250 million ($26,000) fine in the verdict handed down this week for her involvement in a graft case related to the Ministry of Education and Culture.
In September last year, however, public prosecutor Agus Salim demand that Angie be sentenced to 12 years in jail and pay a fine of Rp 500 million, as the prosecutor believed Angie had received Rp 12.58 billion and $2.35 million in compensation from the Permai Group through its marketing director, Mindo Rosalina Manulang. The fee was to compensate for Angie’s service in lobbying the Youth and Sport Ministry as well as the Ministry of Education and Culture so that projects in those ministries would be implemented in ways that were in line with the agenda of Permai Group.
Permai is owned by now-jailed former treasurer of the ruling party, Muhammad Nazaruddin. Emerson Yuntho of Indonesia Corruption Watch said on Saturday that the court had once again demonstrated how weak the legal system is in tackling corruption issues. There are at least 15 other high-profile graft cases that have ended with weak sentences. “There must be a special examination to determine the reasons for this weak punishment against Angie. A thorough investigation into this verdict-making process is absolutely necessary,” he said.
Emerson said ICW would not swallow the theory presented in the verdict at the antigraft court that Angie’s jail term must be lighter than was demanded by the prosecutor because after winning the Miss Indonesia crown she had become Indonesia’s pro-orangutan campaigner, an ambassador of science as appointed by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), a campaigner for promoting reading, a batik ambassador and so forth. The inclusion of such attributions in the verdict against Angie has only tarnished Indonesia’s image as a country that is serious about eradicating its culture of corruption, Emerson said, “because with all those proud attributions, why would she get involved in corruption in the first place?”
The ICW executive also questioned the motives behind Angie’s refusal to reveal the real actors in the graft, as if she had been instructed to absorb all the blame for the sake of concealing the identity of the real actors in this high-profile case. Emerson said lenient punishment for corruptors and bribe-takers means that people won’t be afraid to get involved in graft, knowing that they could easily conceal the money somewhere in order to avoid detection. Then, after going ahead and taking the short jail terms, they could return, enjoying the money for the rest of their lives.
Political psychology expert Hamdi Muluk said that such weak punishments have spoiled people’s sense of justice, because in society everybody wants wrong-doers to be punished accordingly. He said if this tendency is not corrected, “people would think it is better to become corrupt but rich than fight corruption and remain poor. And who doesn’t want to be rich in that manner?” In a related development, Didi Irawadi Syamsudin, chairman of the antigraft department of the ruling Democratic Party, said his party was ready to increase the punishment for corrupters if society demanded it.
“Everything depends on the prerogative of the judges. But if society rejects such a lenient verdict for Angie, the court must listen to [society’s] aspirations and so does the KPK, the Corruption Eradication Commission.” Former antigraft judge Asep Iwan Iriawan said the trouble with the antigraft court is that prosecutors and judges are free to interpret what part of the anticorruption code is violated. “If there is a big corruption case, they would use chapter 12 of the code, which spells up to 20 years in jail for the corrupter. But if there is a special deal, then chapter 5 is used with a jail term of five years.
They should have just used chapter 12 of the code consistently,” Asep said. But in Angie’s case the judges eventually decided that Angie did not cause any losses to the state treasury so there was no corruption — that is why the court did not order her wealth to be confiscated. That is also the reason why the court only decided that Angie was guilty of receiving bribes for projects related to the Education Ministry. The court said that she influenced the ministry on matters related to projects in 2011. But it stopped short of mentioning who would benefit from Angie’s maneuvers. Asep also charged that the prosecutor did not have the courage to prove that all the Permai Group money actually came from the state treasury.
source : the jakarta globe
source : the jakarta globe
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