Nurdin Halid escapes jail, again

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Nurdin Halid, a businessman and a well-known Golkar Party politician, escaped imprisonment for a second time after a court here on Thursday exonerated him of all corruption charges.

Prosecutors indicted Nurdin, chairman of the Confederation of Primary Cooperatives Association (Inkud), of graft for the illegal importation of some 70,000 tons of sugar from Thailand, valued at Rp 3.41 billion (some US$350,000)

But the North Jakarta district court ruled that the indictment against Nurdin was legally flawed and unacceptable, thus the prosecutors' request for him to be jailed for 10 years and fined Rp 200 million was deemed invalid.

Disappointed, the Attorney General's Office said it would appeal the verdict.

"The 19 witnesses testified that they were never questioned about the case and their signatures on Nurdin's dossiers were copied from the dossiers of another case by Abdul Waris Halid," presiding judge Humuntal Pane said.

Abdul Haris is Nurdin's brother who was acquitted by the same court some time ago in the same case.

Pane also said that the evidence brought to the trial -- Rp 173 billion in cash from the auction of 70,000 tons of the imported sugar that was seized in Abdul's case -- was invalid.

"There's a contradiction here because basically no evidence was ever submitted," he was quoted as saying by Antara.

In response, prosecutor Susanto said he had not been aware of the originality of the witnesses' signatures in Nurdin's dossiers, which he said were drawn by investigators at the National Police's fraud squad.

Nurdin's lawyer Ida Farida Sulistyani said she would report the investigators to the police internal affairs division.

Nurdin, a former Golkar legislator from Makassar, South Sulawesi, the hometown of Vice President Jusuf Kalla who also leads the party, said he accepted the court's decision.

However, Nurdin said he would press charges against people whom he believed had tried to make a legal case against him, including former trade and industry minister Rini MS Suwandi.

It was the second time Nurdin has managed to escape jail after he was acquitted in June by the South Jakarta district court for allegedly misusing distribution funds for cooking oil from the State Logistics Agency (Bulog) worth Rp 169 billion.

Deputy Attorney General for special crimes Hendarman Supandji said he found the North Jakarta court and its decision to be "peculiar".

"The court found that it was not feasible for the case to be tried, so Nurdin was acquitted. But if that's the case, the judges should have ruled on it well before (Thursday's decision)," he said.

Hendarman said the court should have determined whether the case was feasible for trial directly after Nurdin delivered his defense pleas, instead of waiting until all of the trial process had been completed.