Thu, 25 Nov 2004

Court jails captain for timber smuggling

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A district court dealt the government's fight against illegal logging a big blow on Wednesday, handing out a lenient sentence to a Vietnamese boat skipper caught red-handed smuggling logs from an offshore island in Papua last year.

The North Jakarta District Court jailed Ngo Van Tuan for two years for his role in transporting logs from Papua to China via Singapore. Indonesia bans the sale of logs to foreign countries.

The court also confiscated Rp 6.8 billion (US$755,500) in cash generated from the sale of some 15,000 cubic meters of the illegal logs and the Mongolian-flag Bravery Falcon ship, which carried the timber.

Prosecutors had earlier demanded four years' jail for the only suspect in the case, who immediately appealed the verdict.

Only about 3,000 cubic meters of the timber found on the boat had legal certificates. They was known to have been sold by PT Hasrat Wira Mandiri, a Jakarta-based concessionaire holder, to a Malaysian businessman, Lim Tiong Cheng, through PT Kalang Group in the South Kalimantan capital of Banjarmasin.

However, some Vietnamese crew of the Bravery Falcon said in their testimony that Singapore-based company V Maritime had ordered the transport of the logs from Papua.

Police arrested Ngo while he was sailing in the Java Sea off Jakarta en route to Singapore in December last year and named him a suspect immediately.

They did not investigate any executives of PT Kalang or the Singaporean firm implicated in the case and prosecutors never prodded them to do so.

Ruling that Ngo had only delivered the illegal logs, the panel of judges led by Sareh Wiyono called for an investigation into the "intellectual actors" behind the crime.

Ngo's lawyer, John K. Azis, said the Indonesian authorities should chase after the sellers and buyers along with the middleman.

Environmental activists had earlier urged the government to issue a government regulation in lieu of a law to speed up the prosecution of those suspected of illegal logging.

They said the existing legal procedures could take months; easily enough time for suspects to destroy evidence or flee the country.

However, Minister of Forestry Malam Sambat Kaban insisted on Wednesday the current laws were sufficient to combat illegal logging.

"The government has announced its political will to tackle the issue. What we must do now is to take action. I am sure the police have already identified the alleged masterminds of the illegal logging cases, so let's move," he said at the court before the verdict was read.

Kaban said the police and prosecutors must indict operators of illegal logging with multiple charges that could lead to their bosses.

In most cases of log smuggling, the law enforcers only prosecuted those physically carrying out the smuggling but never those who ordered or sold the illegal logs.

The forestry ministry estimates there is some Rp 90 trillion in state losses from illegal logging every year.