Manipulation in Supreme Court's verdict revealed

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)