The People's Money

There is nothing more obscene than people stealing large sums of money from people who are in dire poverty. This is what the story of the Rp 546 billion heist at Bank Bali essentially boils down to. Even if all the country's top young models appear naked on the front pages of local newspapers tomorrow, they couldn't top the latest bank scandal to have hit this country. It is too obscene. It hurts our sense of propriety that someone in this country still had the heart to rob from the government, and therefore from the people, in these difficult times.

We must leave it to the experts to determine whether the money PT Era Giat Prima (EGP) collected from Bank Bali for retrieving Rp 904 billion in funds owed by the government was a legitimate transaction or not. Whatever verdict they reach, it was without a doubt an immoral act. Bank Bali is not only a publicly listed company on the Jakarta Stock Exchange, it is also a bank that was about to go into government receivership when the cession deal took place. Bank Bali was the last bank to join the government's bank recapitalization program. That means that the bank was entitled to financial assistance from the government to stay afloat. That money would eventually come from taxpayers.

Morality has never really played a part in the way businesses are run in this country, certainly not during former president Soeharto's 32-year tenure, which ended last year. All the big conglomerates in the country essentially grew out of questionable business practices, practices that we now refer to as KKN, the local acronym for corruption, collusion and nepotism. They all plundered the country of its precious resources, and did not feel any guilt because that was what everybody else was doing.

Most of these companies' business practices were acceptable by the legal standards of the time. They may have been immoral, but they were strongly protected by the law. No wonder the current government is having a hard time undoing the intricate legal webs of the many contracts awarded to politically well-connected businesses on the basis of KKN. The government cannot even recuperate the huge losses that were inflicted as a result of these contracts. Many of these companies, and their contracts, were legitimate.

The exact same reasoning is now being used by EGP owner Setya Novanto, who is also deputy treasury of the ruling Golkar party, to deflect criticisms of his involvement with Bank Bali. And as more details of the way he collected the money come to light, we learn that he did not so much as lift a finger to earn the stupendous fee. Most Indonesians in a lifetime of hard work would never see that kind of money. The Rp 904 billion was owed to Bank Bali in any case, and it was duly disbursed by the government. To add insult to injury, there have been reports that EGP's fee, or most of it, ended up in the coffers of a team set up to secure the election of President B.J. Habibie.

Unfortunately, our business legal code and court practices have changed little since Soeharto's days. Our legal system has hardly been touched by the wave of reforms sweeping the country during the past year. In spite of the government's claims of a massive anticorruption campaign, KKN practices have simply shifted from the families and cronies of Soeharto to those close to the current rulers.

The Bank Bali scandal illustrates a basic flaw in our legal system: It protects the strong but not the weak, is open to abuses and is devoid of moral values. There will come a day when we can equate legitimacy with morality. But not today.

Sadly, those people who were most vocal last month in denouncing what they perceived as pornography in the media have remained largely silent about the scandal. From all perspectives, this scandal is far more obscene and immoral, and much more offensive than pictures of semi-nude women.

Coming at a time when many people are dying in refugee camps because of squalid conditions, when thousands of people are impoverished by the day because of the economic crisis, when thousands of children cannot attend school, when most people in the country have to struggle to make ends meet, when thousands of bank workers have lost their jobs, when the nation is forced to borrow more and more from abroad just to stay afloat at the expense of national pride and sovereignty, this was simply daylight robbery.