PKB finds $40m in 'leakage' from East Java's 2001 budget

Ainur R. Sophiaan, The Jakarta Post, Surabaya

The National Awakening Party (PKB) is considering a rejection of the East Java Governor's recent accountability speech addressed to the provincial legislative council following revelations of financial leakages of up to Rp 400 billion (US$40 million) from the province's 2001 budget.

Syafruddin, chairman of the fact-finding team set up by the provincial legislature's PKB faction to assess the governor's accountability speech, said his team had found numerous financial irregularities in many development projects during the 2001 fiscal year.

"With these findings, our faction is considering a rejection of the governor's accountability speech and will ask both the local police and high prosecutor's office to investigate the irregularities," he said here on Tuesday.

Syafruddin explained that his team had checked a number of development projects over the last two weeks and found evidence of manipulation of funding in some while at least one other project did not exist at all except on paper.

He said his team discovered that a 50-hectare coconut seedling project in Banyuwangi which the governor specifically mentioned in his accountability speech to the legislature on Feb. 12, was one of the phantom projects.

"We did not find the project in the field when conducting our investigations in Banyuwangi," he said.

He also said that according to the governor, the provincial administration had cleared 60 percent of the land for a planned agribusiness wholesale market in Sidoarjo, supposedly absorbing Rp 31 billion from the 2001 budget "but my team found that the cleared land was not nearly the amount he mentioned and a large part of the land was still in private hands."

"We are confused as to which land the provincial administration has appropriated for the agribusiness wholesale market," he added.

According to the governor's accountability speech, of Rp 1.2 trillion allocated for the development projects during the last fiscal year, 30 percent had been used to finance the coconut and agribusiness projects as well as the purchase of a number of computers supposedly worth Rp 21 million each.

Syafruddin said that his team also found that many roads and bridges that had budget allocations for repairs were not completed properly, meaning that only a fraction of the money budgeted was actually used for repair work.

Meanwhile, Soenarjo, secretary of the East Java provincial administration, brushed off PKB's allegations, saying they should double check their findings against the administration's data.

"The PKB faction should have gotten accurate data on the irregularities and then confirmed it with the governor, instead of making controversial public statements, because the provincial administration has its own data and necessary documents on all projects carried out by the administration," argued Soenarjo

Regarding the agribusiness project, he added that the provincial administration had already appropriated a part of the land but could not clear all of it because most of it was being held by private land speculators.

It was not clear why the project was originally put in the budget if the administration did not own it.