Beddu Amang goes to prison for corruption
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Former State Logistics Agency (Bulog) head Beddu Amang began serving a four-year prison sentence for graft on Friday after the Supreme Court rejected his appeal.
Accompanied by his lawyers, who had been successful in preventing their client from being detained since the prosecution began in 2000, Beddu arrived at the Cipinang Penitentiary in East Jakarta on Friday afternoon.
The head of the South Jakarta Prosecutor's Office, R. Himawan, and his staff picked up the convict from the National Police Headquarters, where Beddu was being held over another graft case involving the markup of livestock feed imported by Bulog through four private companies in 1997.
As he walked to the prosecutor's car, Beddu insisted that he was only a state official who was implementing the policies of his bosses.
"I am a former state official. I was just a subordinate implementing the two government policies," he told the swarm of reporters surrounding him.
Clad in a gray sweater, Beddu said he had received a written order to implement the policies that would later turn him into a graft suspect. However, he refused to say whether he was referring to former president Soeharto, who stepped down in May 1998 after more than 30 years in office.
Police investigators said they would continue their investigation into the second graft case allegedly involving Beddu despite his imprisonment.
"We can question him here or at the penitentiary," said Sr. Comr. Marsudhi Hanafi, the director of corruption and white- collar crime at the National Police Headquarters.
On January 6, the Supreme Court rejected the appeal filed by Beddu's lawyers.
Beddu was sentenced to two years in jail by the South Jakarta District Court in 2001 for his involvement in a land swap deal that prosecutors said caused the state Rp 95.4 billion in losses.
Beddu appealed the verdict to the Jakarta High Court, which in 2002 upheld the guilty verdict and increase Beddu's jail term to four years in 2002.
The crime occurred in 1995 when Bulog signed a deal with a company owned by Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, the youngest son of then president Soeharto.
The deal allowed Tommy's company to build a hypermarket on Bulog-owned land in Kelapa Gading, North Jakarta. In return, Tommy was to provide a plot of land to Bulog. Tommy, however, failed to hand over the land to Bulog as agreed. Instead, Bulog paid Tommy's company billions of rupiah for a plot of land to replace the land it lost in Kelapa Gading.
Tommy was tried by the same court for his involvement in the case and was sentenced to 18 months in prison in September 2000. However, he fled before he could begin serving the sentence.
Tommy is now serving a 15 year jail term for his involvement in the contract killing of a Supreme Court justice who rejected his appeal in the land swap case.