Marzuki blames predecessor for slow work
JAKARTA (JP): Attorney General Marzuki Darusman has blamed his predecessor for his sluggish efforts in tracking down suspected hidden assets and wealth belonging to former president Soeharto's family and cronies.
"If the search to locate the assets had been started long ago, we could have obtained the documents of money transferred to their accounts overseas through the now defunct banks," he told journalists at his office on Friday.
Marzuki, who has served as attorney general since October 1999, argued that his office encountered problems in tracing the evidence of the existence of such assets, as the bank's documents and information of the Soehartos wealth are now scattered in several financial institutions.
Such lack of information, Marzuki claimed, has become a stumbling block for the government in obtaining confirmation from several countries, including Austria and Switzerland, of the properties and bank accounts of the Soeharto family.
"Their law requires that we must provide information on the account numbers belonging to particular names before they can give us further information.
"The international community really intends to help us for their own sake ... they don't want to be known as countries where money which has been obtained unlawfully is kept," he added.
Marzuki said that since the government had yet to obtain the exact amount of such hidden wealth, it would use an estimated amount of US$15 billion as revealed by U.S. magazine Time.
"The figure was a result of two years of thorough research, so we can use it as a reference ... but it could also be more than that."
Earlier, Marzuki said that the New Zealand government had also sent a list consisting of part of the hidden assets, and that his office would soon send a team to the neighboring country to check on the information.
Former president Soeharto faces graft charges for funneling some $571 million of state funds amassed through seven charity foundations he chaired into the businesses belonging to his children, relatives and cronies.
The case is now in the hands of the Supreme Court, since the lower South Jakarta District Court dropped the charges last September after hearing medical arguments from a team of doctors that Soeharto is mentally and physically unfit to stand trial.
In 1998, then attorney general Andi Muhammad Ghalib headed a special team to probe Soeharto's wealth and claimed that there was $3 million found in banks in the former ruler's name.
Soon after Soeharto denied the findings, the search for the wealth stopped and the prosecutors halted the investigation until Marzuki reopened the case against the former president in October 1999.
Ghalib, in a biography issued earlier this week, cited that he had obtained sufficient evidence to drag Soeharto to court, but the investigation was stopped by then Army chief Gen. (ret) Wiranto and president B.J. Habibie.
Marzuki commented that such a revelation clearly shows the pressures from the past regime on the prosecutors which in turn hampered their investigations.
"I thank Ghalib for revealing this. I will study this information and clarify it since the public needs to know what really happened which caused the prosecutors to halt the past investigation into Soeharto.
"We will likely summon those involved in making the decision to stop the investigation to clarify the reason behind it. If there were pressures from outsiders, then why should they have complied?," he told The Jakarta Post by phone.
Marzuki also revealed that Bank Indonesia had frozen accounts belonging to Soeharto's favorite son Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, who is the convicted in a graft case and is still on the run.(bby)