Court urged to continue fraud case

JAKARTA (JP): State prosecutors urged the Central Jakarta District court yesterday to continue trying two men accused of defrauding Bank Indonesia.

Prosecutors Soejitno and Tony Spontana told the court to reject the defense lawyers' objections last week which said the indictment failed to support their accusations with details, it contained contradictory inaccuracies and the investigation had not been carried out by the right body.

"The indictment goes into detail on how, where and when the defendants were involved in the case," prosecutor Tony said.

Standing trial are Naman Kawi, head of the cashiers section of the central bank, and businessman Andi Muis. They are among five men charged with defrauding the bank of Rp 7 billion (US$2.9 million).

The defense lawyers had said the presentation of evidence was complicated by the different degrees of seriousness of the charges but Tony said, "we followed the standard and widely used procedures".

"Naman and Andi are primarily accused of violating the same article of the Penal Code, but each has also been charged with lesser offenses for breaching other articles," he said.

The defense lawyers' had also objected to the indictment's inaccuracies in the sums of the alleged payouts. But prosecutor Soejitno said, "If we read it thoroughly, we do not need to argue about the inaccurate figures. They are only a typing error."

He told the court it was not against the law for the police to have carried out the investigation instead of the attorney general's office. "In fact, later on the investigation was continued by the attorney general's office," he said.

The prosecutors said they felt they only needed to answer some of the lawyers' objections because the rest would be proved in the trial.

The trial was postponed until next week. (13)