Mark Dodd and Stephen Fitzpatrick – The warning signs were obvious to anyone paying attention. Cashed up Indonesian government officials were suddenly able to afford flashy new cars and motorbikes.
Or take the case of the south Sumatran lord mayor who over the course of several months racked up a personal laundry bill of more than $6000. And then there were the overseas junkets and personal home improvements.
Sadly, the spending spree has been financed from cash looted from the billion-dollar fund to rebuild the shattered lives of tens of thousands of Indonesian tsunami victims. And it raises serious questions about how much aid has actually reached the tsunami survivors.
It seems endemic corruption has drained tens of millions of dollars from the international relief fund for tsunami victims at a time when tens of thousands are still living in tents.
In Australia, aid organisations are counting their losses after the Indonesian National Audit agency reported $50 million missing from the country's post-tsunami reconstruction fund.
The report into the spending of $800 million donated by local and international agencies found numerous cases of serious mismanagement and likely embezzlement. Of 1219 government posts established to distribute aid and manage reconstruction in Aceh and Nias, at least 715 had failed to even provide financial reports of their activities, the agency found.
Seven of these posts are estimated to have been entrusted with aid to the value of 36.57 billion rupiah ($548,000) between them. As much as 708 billion rupiah worth of material aid such as medicines donated by other countries has gone astray, the report noted.
It found officials from other regions in Indonesia spent tsunami money on development and aid projects in their non-tsunami-affected areas.
Aid officials are at pains to stress that Australian money is better accounted for than assistance from other countries. This is because of the strong Australia-Indonesia working relationship that existed before the disastrous 2004 Boxing Day tsunami smashed its way across the island of Nias, the west coast of north Sumatra and the trouble-wracked province of Aceh.
But that does not mean Australian charities are unaffected. The highly respected international charity Oxfam has launched a corruption investigation into its aid program in Aceh because of suspicions "tens of thousands of dollars" have been misappropriated from its emergency building program.
Andrew Hewett, executive director of Oxfam Australia, told The Australian the investigation, which is due to be completed later this month, has resulted in a suspension of the agency's building program.
"This came to our attention through regular audits. We [Oxfam] believed it was serious enough to mount a full-blown investigation," he said yesterday.
Stalwarts of the compassion industry such as Save the Children say they are also adding up the bill from unscrupulous local building contractors responsible for the construction of hundreds of sub-standard dwellings.
It is an extremely sensitive issue and no one likes to admit they have been conned out of millions of donor dollars.
A Melbourne-based spokeswoman for Save the Children says unconfirmed reports of missing funds totalling more than $1 million were "probably excessive", but she declined to make an estimate.
Indonesian graft investigator Akhiruddin Mahjuddin has recommended the charity demolish 741 sub-standard dwellings built as part of the reconstruction effort.
Mahjuddin heads the Aceh anti-corruption movement, a body partly funded by foreign donors. He claims the Government's own reconstruction agency has substantially overspent on the provision of temporary emergency housing that was either overpriced or non-existent, citing a figure of more than $1.5million.
He lists a litany of rip-offs including a fleet of 100 new fishing boats in which the purchase price was almost double the real price.
Other rorts include the staff of one aid group occupying 70 new houses built for tsunami victims, while only one house has so far been built from $4 million raised by a German aid group to cover the cost of rebuilding 400 homes.
Ridaya La Ode Ngkowe, from the Indonesian Corruption Watch on Aceh, singles out the country's national rehabilitation and reconstruction agency BRR as being partly responsible for the mess, citing collusion between the agency and tenderers. The charges have been denied by BRR.
Save the Children's Aceh-based Jon Bugge confirmed $1 million has been spent on building 798 new homes and a recent inspection had found 612 requiring "major reconstruction work" and another 186 needing "minor improvements".
Expatriate jobs in the Aceh disaster zone are generally well remunerated and sought after by professional "mission hoppers". But with big salaries comes big responsibility. And Aceh's donors do have a right to ask where the building inspectors were during the construction phase.
Of the 170,000 homes pledged to replace those destroyed in the tsunami, 16 months after the disaster only 15,000 have been built while thousands of families still live under canvas.
Despite the corruption setback, Save the Children says it plans to forge ahead and complete the construction of 3660 houses, 94 schools and 70 health centres as part of its five-year plan.
The charity has certainly played a key role in the improvement of the lives of Aceh's young. The charity is spending $156 million on its tsunami response in Indonesia and has so far assisted 276,000 survivors.
More than $1 million worth of textbooks and school supplies have been distributed to 60,000 school children, while 1000 teachers have been trained and scholarships given to another 2000 students.
Bugge says action is being taken to recoup money from unscrupulous builders. "We expect the contractors to rectify the problems and cover the bulk of the costs, and if required we will look at legal options," he says.
Save the Children has worked in Aceh for 30 years and remains committed to the long-term development of the war-battered province. "We will tolerate nothing less than the most efficient and effective use of donated money to help children and their families," Bugge says.
Oxfam says its investigation involved losses totalling "tens of thousands of dollars". The aid agency is overseeing reconstruction projects totalling more than $100 million in northern Sumatra and Aceh.
While the shelter program has been suspended, other essential projects, including water cartage and sanitation, are unaffected.
Hewett says he takes "no great pleasure" in going public about Oxfam's investigation. "Clearly there's a lot of money going into Aceh," he says. "It's in a desperate state and there is a lot of poverty."
He says that while the international aid effort in Aceh has been effective, it has been less than perfect in its implementation. "It's kept people alive," he says, but then admits there have also been "real problems, disappointments and frustrations".
Smaller aid agencies such as AUSTCARE say their Aceh operations have not been affected by the scourge of corruption. Tight controls over the disbursement of funds and careful scrutiny of Indonesian joint partners have given their operation a clean bill of health.
But a spokesman told The Australian of one potential Indonesian joint partner rejected by AUSTCARE in Aceh because of possible corruption concerns.
The federal Government's aid arm, AusAID, says $220 million has now been committed to relief and reconstruction projects in north Sumatra and Aceh.
And it stresses that Australian money is better accounted for than assistance from other countries. This is because of the strong Australia-Indonesia working relationship that existed before the tsunami.
It says many non-government organisations from other countries, which had to build networks to distribute aid and run rebuilding projects, encountered many problems. "In some cases they haven't had the people who know how the system here works," one staff member comments. "But Australia already had strong relationships in place, from the finance ministry at the top, to the problems of money laundering, right down to management at the district and sub-district level."
Australian Government funding to Indonesia was running at $160 million annually before the tsunami, and is now estimated to be worth $2 billion over five years across the archipelago.
However, AusAID does not directly finance Indonesian Government projects or contribute to the general Aceh rebuilding fund, the latter a key mechanism by which many aid agencies have lost control of their money, because of the fund's lack of accountability.
AusAID's staff now also includes a full-time anti-corruption officer, an appointment reflecting President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's concern about the general problem of corruption in Indonesia.
Under Yudhoyono's administration several high-profile Indonesians have been tried and jailed for corrupt activities, including the former minister for religious affairs, Syed Agil Hussein Al Munawar, imprisoned for five years in February for embezzling government money set aside for Muslims making the holy pilgrimage to Mecca.
A senior AusAID official who asked not to be named says specially developed systems to guard against corruption have ensured its Aceh programs have not been hurt by graft. "We're working in a very corrupt country, we're aware of that."
[Additional reporting: Michael Sheridan in Banda Aceh.]