Police covering up car theft bribery

Referring to your article in The Jakarta Post, on Dec. 14, entitled Police say no charge to report stolen car; public begs to differ, I am flabbergasted that the Police force, or its spokesperson, Sr. Comr. Tjiptono (the Post, Dec. 13) said a day earlier that the police never demanded bribes from autotheft victims.

During the Idul Fitri holiday in 2003, our office car, an Isuzu Panther Minivan worth around Rp 65 million with a Jakarta license plate number was stolen in Sukabumi, West Java. The process of obtaining the necessary documents to be able to process the insurance claim, cost my company Rp 5.7 million and took six weeks to arrange as the documents had to be processed in Sukabumi, Bandung and Jakarta. The cost had been kept to a minimum as many connections within the police bureaucracy were made use of, but without these "friends", who knows what the cost would have been.

Even the insurance companies/their agents are aware of these charges and very often the claims adjuster for the insurance company will provide mediation services between the insured and the police to arrange for the necessary documents.

M. HUSSIEN Jakarta