Probe into Akbar's graft case together

Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The investigation by the Attorney General's Office into the high profile graft scandal involving House of Representatives Speaker Akbar Tandjung may have to start from zero thanks to conflicting and sometimes groundless arguments during examination.

On Wednesday, Dadang Sukandar, chairman of the Raudlatul Jannah Foundation, which was appointed to spend the Rp 40 billion (US$4 million) belonging to the State Logistics Agency (Bulog), strongly challenged investigators' claims that food distribution in its project for the needy in 1999 never took place.

The Attorney General's Office said on Tuesday that there was no evidence to indicate that food had been disbursed to the people in five Java provinces whose names were on a list given by then-coordinator ministry of people's welfare and poverty alleviation Haryono Suyono.

But the random sampling by the investigators in their latest field check was not enough to cover the flow of the funds used to finance the project, Dadang insisted.

Dadang, one of the suspects in the scandal, which also included Akbar, explained that not all residents in the 1,537 regencies targeted under the project received the food packages.

He claimed that the packages were handed directly to the recipients without any help from local administrations, as required in national social safety net programs to expedite the process.

"The investigators' finding cannot show that we didn't use the money to distribute the food. Maybe they interviewed those who didn't receive the packages because, on average, 80 percent of residents in one regency didn't get them," he said at a press conference.

"We called the investigators to help us formulate a proper method to prove the use of the money," Dadang said.

Dadang stressed that the whole operation was not under the government's full control, since it had become the foundation's project.

Over 1.6 million brown boxes were provided, each filled with five kilograms of rice, eight packages of instant noodles, one kilogram of sugar, and one medium-sized bottle of soy sauce, according to Dadang.

"I entrusted the entire distribution process to the project officer, who was also the vice chairman, Dadi Surjadi," Dadang said. "But he's dead now."