Rudy Ramli files defamation suit

JAKARTA (JP): Former Bank Bali president Rudy Ramli filed a defamation charge on Friday against senior officials of the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (IBRA) and Standard Chartered Bank (SCB), Rudy's lawyer said.

Samosir of Bob Nasution and Partners law firm said the effect of the defamation made by IBRA chairman Glenn Yusuf, his deputy Farid Harianto and SCB senior official Douglas K. Beckett on Rudy was unerasable.

Samosir said IBRA executives accused Rudy of quietly selling Bank Bali's assets to enrich himself at the expense of the bank.

The unfair statements by these IBRA executives were widely reported in August by various media, Samosir added.

"What Rudy planned to do was actually sell the bank's nonperforming loans at a discounted value to help reduce the bank's recapitalization cost," he said.

All these procedures of the asset sale plan, Samosir said, were carried out transparently with the help of independent consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers. And until now, there has not been any wrongdoing found nor any attempts at such wrongdoing by Rudy in relation to the planned asset sale, he added.

After evaluating SCB's due diligence report on Bank Bali, Glenn and Farid said to the media sometime in August that Rudy was strongly indicated to have quietly sold some US$130 million of Bank Bali's loan portfolio assets for personal self- enrichment, Samosir said.

IBRA took over ownership of Bank Bali on July 23 after the Ramli family, the former owners of the bank, failed to come up with 20 percent of the recapitalization fund needed by July 22.

IBRA then established a management agreement with SCB on July 26, allowing SCB to control the management of Bank Bali from that point.

SCB then found irregularities in Bank Bali's financial statement which showed there was an inappropriate large amount of money transferred from Bank Bali to a third party. This finding turned into the banking scandal which has not been resolved until now.

The scandal centers around some Rp 546 billion (US$80 billion at current rate) that was transferred out of the bank in early June as a "commission" for service given by investment firm PT Era Giat Prima (EGP) to help the bank recoup some Rp 904 billion in interbank claims on closed-down Bank Dagang Nasional Indonesia (BDNI).

EGP is owned by businessmen Djoko Chandra and Setya Novanto, who are affiliated with the Golkar Party.

Bank Bali should not have used the service of EGP because interbank claims on closed-down banks were guaranteed by the government through the blanket guarantee program, according to IBRA. (udi)