Nurdin Halid escapes jail, again

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.