Manipulation in Supreme Court's verdict revealed

JAKARTA (JP): The uproar over alleged corruption in the Supreme Court reached a new stage yesterday with the disclosure of details of the improprieties reportedly committed by senior judges.

Officials of the Association of the Gandhi Seva Loka, party to a document fraud case which Deputy Chief Justice Adi Andojo Soetjipto said was marred with corruption, revealed irregularities in the Court's decision yesterday.

The association, which controls the management of the disputed Gandhi Memorial School, charged that the Court has ignored the police analysis of the validity of some documents. After excluding this vital piece of evidence, the Court then acquitted defendant Ram Gulumal of all charges of document falsification.

A board member of the association, Suresh G. Vaswani, said Gulumal had falsified signatures in his effort to acquire the land for the Gandhi Memorial School. This violation, committed in the 1970s, was only made known to the Association in 1991.

Gulumal was sentenced by the Central Jakarta District Court in 1993 to one year in prison for falsifying documents to acquire the land and permits for the new school.

The verdict was upheld by the Jakarta High Court on appeal but the sentence was reduced to eight months.

The case sparked an outcry when a group of Supreme Court judges, led by Samsoedin Aboebakar, ruled last July that the charges against Gulumal could not be proven.

Suresh also said yesterday that the judges had made fundamental errors. "Originally, in the documents, Gulumal was identified as an Indonesian citizen. Someone then erased this data and retyped this as 'Indian'," he said.

The lawyer of the association Amir Syamsuddin said that, however, that they could not contest the Supreme Court's decision.

"We cannot ask for a review of the Supreme Court's verdict. My client is the party who reported the alleged documents fraud to the police," he said. "The most we can do is report the irregularities we found in the verdict to authorized officials."

Suresh said he and his colleagues had twice asked Chief Justice Soerjono for an audience to report these irregularities. They have yet to receive Soerjono's response.

Suresh also said that the association officials then decided to come to Adi Andojo and reported the irregularities.

In a related development, Adi said yesterday that he has not yet been summoned by anybody to be questioned about his supposedly confidential letter to the Central Jakarta Prosecutors' Office asking the office to file a review against the Supreme Court's verdict.

This letter, which Adi wrote last year, fell into the hands of the press earlier this month and caused the uproar.

Adi also said there was a legal possibility for the Attorney General's Office to conduct an investigation into the bribe which he alleges changed hands between the judges and the defendant. Adi had revealed earlier there were indications that the judges pocketed a bribe of Rp 1.4 billion (US$600,000) from Gulumal.

"However, we have to wait for the result of investigation of the Coordinator for the Supreme Court's internal supervision," he said.

Earlier Adi had expressed his doubts that the internal investigation would proceed independently, proposing instead that the office of the Vice-President conduct the investigation.(imn)