Armando Siahaan, Jakarta – The House of Representatives team monitoring investigations of the Bank Century scandal threatened on Wednesday to reduce the budget of law enforcement agencies if they failed to produce results in line with lawmakers' recommendation that the bailout was illegal.
The National Police, the Attorney General's Office and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) are probing the legality of the Rp 6.7 trillion ($737 million) bailout of collapsing Bank Century in November 2008, which the legislature voted was illegal in a March session.
The monitoring team, which has criticized what it perceives to be a slow pace of investigation, believes that all three law enforcers are leaning toward concluding that there were no irregularities in the rescue package.
Anis Matta, the House deputy speaker from the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) and leader of the monitoring team, said that if the three agencies failed to execute their task in accordance to the legislature's recommendation, it would consider various sanctions, including financial.
"One of them is through the budget," Anis said, referring to using the legislature's right to reduce the budget allocation for government bodies.
Bambang Soesatyo, a lawmaker from the Golkar Party and a vocal critic of the bailout, said budget allocations were "based on performance," and that perceived ineptitude in investigating the Bank Century case would constitute poor performance.
The three legal bodies have failed to conduct the investigation using the House recommendation as the main point of reference, Bambang added.
"We have yet to see the three agencies investigate" the officials who were responsible for approving the bailout policy, Bambang said, referring to Vice President Boediono (central bank governor at the time of the bailout), acting Bank Indonesia Governor Darmin Nasution and former Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati.
Boediono and Sri Mulyani have been questioned, but were never formally investigated in the case.
"We can cut [law enforcers'] budget as a form of punishment," the Golkar lawmaker said.
Mahfudz Siddiq, a lawmaker from the PKS who spoke on behalf of the monitoring team during a press conference, said the team would invite the agencies to go over evidence in the case on Aug. 25.
Bambang said lawmakers would use data gathered by the House probe into the bailout to cross-examine evidence from law-enforcement agencies.
"From the data that we have, there is more than enough evidence [that the bailout was illegal]," Bambang said.
Mahfudz said the cross-examination did not serve as an official legal examination, but it was more to test the law enforcers' tentative conclusions from an academic perspective.
Golkar and the PKS, though part of the government coalition, voted to find the bailout illegal, while the ruling Democratic Party and two other coalition partners voted otherwise.
Didi Irawadi Syamsuddin, a Democratic lawmaker, urged all parties to let law enforcers do their job without any intervention from legislators.
"The investigation should be handed over to law enforcers who use existing legal channels," Didi said.
The press conference took place following increasing criticism that the House monitoring team was losing interest in pursuing the long-running Bank Century bailout saga.
The last time the monitoring team held a meeting was on June 9, when it summoned the same three law-enforcement bodies and concluded that their findings at the time were inadequate.