Saturday, February 13, 2010

CENTURY SCANDAL : Bank Century inquiry team yields no dirt on Yudhoyono




(News Terupdate) - The House of Representatives' Bank Century inquiry committee began its field investigation in five major cities on Friday, but no significant findings have been unearthed so far.

Committee chairman Idrus Marham said lawmakers wanted to make "clear" whether parts of the Rp 6.76 trillion (US$716 million) were channeled into the campaign funds of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in the last presidential election.

In Denpasar, Bali, committee members failed to dig deeper into the alleged illegal disbursement of the bank's bailout fund to depositors as they were rejected access to data on 20 depositors from a branch of Bank Mutiara. Bank Century was renamed Bank Mutiara last year.

"We are going to pursue alternative legal methods to get the data that we need," said Bali team leader Gayus Lumbuun from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P).

In a meeting with the Bali Police later in the day, the committee handed over documents from the Financial Transaction Report and Analysis Center (PPATK) listing suspicious transactions to be probed.

In Medan, North Sumatra, committee members made little progress in tracing suspicious transfers from the bank's central office in Jakarta to a branch in the city.

"We cannot reveal the names of the account holders yet because we still need to verify them for more accuracy," leader of the Medan team, Benny Kabur Harman from the Democratic Party said after a meeting with Bank Indonesia (BI) officials.

BI director for Medan, Gatot Sugiono, acknowledged there was a transaction worth Rp 240 billion in November 2008, but said that such an amount was not uncommon.

The team deployed to Makassar, South Sulawesi, also had little success.

The team could not find a solid connection between an auto repair company owner, Amiruddin Rustan, who according to the PPATK received part of the bailout fund worth Rp 4 billion, with a company that contributed money to Yudhoyono's campaign team.

Amiruddin was suspected of being connected to the company because of the similarity of his name with the company called Rustan Consulting, which contributed Rp 500 million to Yudhoyono's campaign.

In Surabaya, the team's visit also failed to yield much information, but was greeted by enraged former depositors of Bank Century and former clients of the bank's investment arm PT Antaboga Sekuritas.

A depositor, Sri Gayatri, unleashed her anger because she was not allowed to enter the Bank Mutiara office. Gayatri repeatedly hit and kicked the bank's closed gates, before hurling a flower pot at them.

Members of the inquiry committee also continued their investigations in Jakarta, meeting BI and Finance Ministry officials and Raden Pardede, former secretary of the Financial System Stability Committee (KSSK), the body responsible for ordering the Century bailout. Finance Minister and former KSSK chairwoman Sri Mulyani Indrawati was not available as she was on a minor pilgrimage to Mecca.

At a meeting with Pardede and Arif Wibisono, a Finance Ministry's employee at the legal bureau, Maruarar Sirait of the PDI-P pointed out how a letter on the KSSK's decision had a missing article. The articles were numbered first, second and fourth; there was no third.

Raden Pardede, secretary of the now-defunct KSSK, said it was an "honest mistake".

The field investigation will continue until Sunday. The inquiry committee is expected to issue a final view on the case on March 2.

Aditya Suharmoko and Apriadi Gunawan contributed to the story

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