Soeharto's brother sentenced to four years
Soeharto's brother sentenced to four years
M. Taufiqurrahman, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The Central Jakarta District Court on Tuesday sentenced tycoon Probosutedjo, the half-brother of former President Soeharto, to four-years imprisonment after finding him guilty of embezzling state reforestation funds.
Presiding Judge Muhammad Saleh also ordered that Probo return Rp 100.9 billion (US$11.2 million) to the state and to pay a fine of Rp 30 million.
The defendant, however, will remain free pending an appeal.
Another factor that prevented Probo from going to jail immediately was the fact that he was considered by the judges to have been cooperative during the trial.
Probo, a director of timber company PT Menara Hutan Buana (MHB), was found guilty of enriching himself by overstating the size of the company's timber estate in South Kalimantan so as to bigger interest-free reforestation loans.
"MHB claimed that it managed a 75,751-hectare estate, but a survey conducted by the Ministry of Forestry revealed that the company had only 29,675 hectares under its management," said chief prosecutor I Ketut Martika.
In fact, the government disbursed enough reforestation funds for an 80,000-hectare timber estate, the prosecutor said.
One of the judges, Andi Samsan Nganro, also revealed that the defendant later put some of the funds in a bank as an on-call deposit, and earned significant interest on it.
The four-year prison term was more than the three-year sentence demanded by the prosecution.
Probo is the third of Soeharto's cronies to receive a jail term for graft. Soeharto's son, Tommy, and close aide Bob Hasan are both now serving out their sentences in Nusakambangan prison, off the coast of Cilacap, Central Java.
Separately, a lawyer from the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute, Taufik Basari, said that the jail term for Probo indicated an improvement as regards law enforcement in corruption cases.
"I think we are beginning to see the light. In the past, corruption trials always ended up vindicating the perpetrators," he told The Jakarta Post.
However, he played down the possibility that other cronies of former president Soeharto might be brought to justice in the near future.