Court Rejects Pretrial Motion of Former Sumbawa Deputy Regent in COVID-19 Mask Corruption Case

The Mataram District Court has rejected a pretrial motion filed by former Sumbawa Deputy Regent Dewi Noviany, thereby affirming the legality of her designation as a suspect in a corruption case related to the procurement of COVID-19 masks. The court declared the petition inadmissible. Dewi Noviany, who is the younger sister of former West Nusa Tenggara Governor Zulkieflimansyah, had sought to have the suspect designation, issued by the Mataram Police Criminal Investigation Unit in May 2025, declared invalid and annulled. She is one of six suspects in the case, which involves alleged corruption in the mask procurement project at the NTB Cooperatives and Small and Medium Enterprises Office in 2020. The other suspects include a former head of the NTB Regional Secretariat’s Economic Bureau, Wirajaya Kusuma, and his wife Rabiatul Adawiyah, former NTB Tourism Office Secretary Chalid Tomassoang Bulu, and two other individuals, Kamaruddin and M Haryadi Wahyudin. The case files for all six suspects were declared complete around April 2026, but investigators have yet to transfer the suspects and evidence to the prosecution. None of the suspects have been detained; their detention has been suspended and they are only subject to mandatory reporting. The mask procurement project was funded by an IDR 12.3 billion unexpected expenditure budget from the NTB Cooperatives and SMEs Office. An audit by the NTB Financial and Development Supervisory Agency calculated state losses from the alleged corruption at IDR 1.58 billion.