March 22, 2002
A fugitive Indonesian banker was sentenced to life imprisonment for diverting $200 million worth of emergency loans into his personal bank account. An Indonesian court handed down the rare life sentence on Friday to Hendra Rahardja, former chief of the now defunct Bank BHS, for graft. Prosecutors believe he is currently holed up in Australia.
Rahardja was found guilty of corruption in absentia along with two other defendants who each received 20 years in jail. The two other defendants, who were senior Bank BHS executives, also remain at large.
"The council of judge declares the defendants.... as proven convincingly guilty of engaging collectively in corruption...," presiding judge Soebardi said during the sentencing.
Soebardi said the state suffered around 1.95 trillion rupiah ($197.7 million) in losses from the case. It was not clear if the losses amounted to the central bank funds injected into the bank.
Movement on a number of high-profile graft cases in recent weeks have raised hopes that Indonesia might be serious about rooting out graft, but many political analysts remain skeptical that any lasting results will be achieved.
Indonesia's anti-graft watchdog said the verdict was a step forward for President Megawati Sukarnoputri's pledge to get tough on corruption.
The central bank extended 144.5 trillion rupiah ($14.65 billion) to dozens of banks at the height of the Asian financial crisis in a largely failed attempt to rescue the sector. State auditors have said most of the money was probably mismanaged.
A joke
But Indonesia Corruption Watch said Rahardja's case highlighted inconsistencies as another banker also convicted over central bank emergency loans had received a much lighter sentence.
Earlier this month, a separate sentenced David Nusa Wijaya, former director of another bank, to one year in jail for graft, which marked the first corruption conviction over the central bank loan scandal.
Wijaya was ordered to repay 1.27 trillion rupiah in losses to the state, although it was unclear if that also was the amount injected into his bank.
"The verdict is a step forward but it is yet to represent an improvement in the judicial system as a whole because there has not been any consistency... for instance, the verdict on David Nusa was very light," Teten Masduki, head of Indonesia Corruption Watch, told Reuters news agency.
"The government must now take aggressive follow-up action to extradite (Rahardja)... otherwise it might indeed look like a joke. For all you know, he may be laughing now."
Political analysts have said Indonesia's inability to get to the bottom of the central bank emergency loan scandal underscores the weakness of the judicial system and Jakarta's commitment to clean up graft that has made the country a byword for corruption.
Prosecutors said they would discuss efforts to locate Rahardja with the government.
Rahardja is the brother of Eddy Tansil, an infamous tycoon who walked out of an Indonesian prison in 1996 after being jailed for defrauding a state bank of $430 million in a scandal that shocked the world's fourth most populous country.
Tansil escaped two years into a 20-year sentence.
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