The Jakarta Corruption Court has sentenced two subordinates of Manpower and Transmigration Minister Muhaimin Iskandar to three years in prison for accepting bribes in connection to a development project in Papua.
Although Muhaimin was said to have played a pivotal role in the financial scandal, the panel of judges on Thursday stopped short of naming the minister.
The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has said it won’t stop hunting the other possible actors involved in the scandal, including Muhaimin, even though the court rulings appear to negate his possible complicity.
Muhaimin, who is also the chairman of the National Awakening Party (PKB), has not yet been named a suspect in the case.
KPK spokesman Johan Budi said the case was not yet closed.
“This is the judges’ view in their authority. The KPK, on the other hand, is not closing the case,” Johan said on Thursday.
He asserted that the KPK may well restart their investigations, regardless of the court’s ruling. “It is highly likely that we will open a new investigation to see whether there are other parties involved,” he said.
In the court proceedings on Thursday, judges found I Nyoman Suisnaya and Dadong Irbarelawan guilty of accepting Rp 1.5 billion in bribes from a Papuan-based company.
Nyoman was secretary of the ministry’s Directorate General for the Development of Transmigration Areas, while Dadong was head of an evaluation and reporting unit in another directorate at the ministry.
“The defendant has been found guilty and, therefore, we will send him to prison for three years and order him to pay a Rp 100 million fine or [if he cannot pay] he must serve an additional three months in prison,” said presiding Judge Sudjatmiko at the conclusion of Nyoman’s trial.
Dadong was handed the same prison term and a Rp 100 million fine at the end of his trial, which was presided over by Judge Herdi Agusten.
However, the judges disagreed with the prosecutors, who had intended to charge the two men under Article 12, clause b of the 2001 Anticorruption Law, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail.
Instead, the two panels of judges found them guilty of violating Article 5 (2) of the law, which carries a maximum of 5 years imprisonment.
Previously, prosecutors had demanded jail terms of five years for Nyoman and four-and-a-half years for Dadong.
Both panels of judges concluded that the two were barred from receiving any gifts or cash in their capacity as public officials.
The bribery case made headlines after Nyoman and Dadong were allegedly caught red-handed accepting Rp 1.5 billion in bribes from businesswoman Dharnawati of PT Papua Alam Jaya on Aug. 25 last year.
The cash was part of Rp 2 billion promised by Dharnawati in exchange for an infrastructure project in four regions of Papua, which would use funding from the Infrastructure Development Acceleration Program (PPID).
Dharnawati had not handed over the remaining Rp 500 million yet, as the KPK caught her first. She is now serving two years and six months in prison.
Other actors implicated in the case have not yet been named suspects. They comprise Nyoman’s immediate supervisor Jamaluddin Malik and Muhaimin’s special aides — the PKB’s Ali Mudhori and M. Fauzi, as well as Iskandar “Acos” Pasojo and a former official for the Tax Directorate at the Finance Ministry, Sindu Malik Pribadi.
Previous trial sessions revealed that Jamaluddin helped Nyoman and Dadong seal the deal, while Muhaimin’s aides acted as brokers between the officials and Dharnawati. Sindu also allegedly negotiated a Rp 7.3 billion “commitment fee” with Dharnawati.
However, the judges ordered the KPK to return some of the evidence used by prosecutors to build the cases against Ali, Sindu, Dharnawati and Nyoman. The evidence includes laptops, BlackBerry smartphones and several documents.
Previously, Nyoman had testified that the House of Representatives’ budget committee has accepted
Rp 20 billion in the same case. He asserted that from the beginning, there were players from both outside and inside the ministry who had advanced the project dishonestly.