Taufik Darusman – It is only a matter of weeks or even days before the Corruption Eradication Commission ushers in a new chairman. But in a country where politicking has virtually become a national pastime, it seems that even the state antigraft body feels it is entitled to join the fray.
The commission, also known as the KPK, has not made many headlines lately for the arrests or prosecutions of major graft suspects.
So last week, in a move that suggested a new bid to ramp up momentum, the commission named 26 former and current legislators as suspects in a Rp 24 billion ($2.7 million) bribery scandal surrounding the 2004 appointment of Miranda Goeltom as the central bank's senior deputy governor.
In a vote at the House of Representatives to decide the best person for the Bank Indonesia post, only 54 lawmakers cast their ballot, with 41 of them choosing Miranda over two other candidates.
As we now know, 39 of those lawmakers who voted for Miranda were paid off for having done so.
Out of the 26 bribery suspects named by the KPK last week, 14 of them are former or current lawmakers from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), including the legislator who initially blew the whistle on the case, Agus Condro Prayitno.
The rest came from the ranks of the Golkar Party, the Islam-based United Development Party (PPP) and the now disbanded House faction for the military and police. Each of the 26 suspects allegedly received travelers checks worth between Rp 250 million and Rp 1 billion, apparently on a sliding scale of their importance.
The Anti-Corruption Court had earlier jailed four people who were not on the KPK's current list of 26 suspects, the most recent being the PDI-P's Dudhie Makmun Murod, who is the son of Lt. Gen. (ret.) Makmun Murod, the former commander of the Army's Strategic Reserve Command in Jakarta during Suharto's reign as president.
In a highly-publicized trial, Dudhie had said that senior officials from his party had instructed him and his colleagues to vote for Miranda. Dudhie's testimony, if true however, raises the question as to whether the party directive was considered necessary.
Given her impeccable banking credentials and her profile – she is reputed to be on a first name basis with former US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan – Miranda would have probably prevailed in the three-way race anyway.
Of equal importance is why the PDI-P was so insistent that Miranda, and not one of her equally able but less media-savvy rivals, should get the position.
Had prosecutors bothered to raise this issue, the findings might have shown that the scandal was not an ordinary bribery case, and that there was a hidden agenda.
In naming 26 suspects – out of the 39 who had allegedly cashed the checks – the KPK has left many wondering what happened to the remaining 13.
However, the identity of the person who financed the bribery scandal is still the biggest mystery of all.
Court proceedings showed the checks were delivered to several lawmakers by an associate of businesswoman and socialite Nunun Nurbaeti Daradjatun, who is the wife of Adang Daradjatun, the powerful and wealthy former deputy chief of the National Police and a sitting lawmaker from the Islam-based Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).
Nunun is said to have developed a case of amnesia around the same time as the scandal started to make political waves, and is now receiving medical treatment in Singapore, a city-state that has no extradition treaty with Indonesia.
Apparently her illness was so serious that it prevented KPK investigators from getting anything of worth from her when they traveled to Singapore to question her.
However, upon hearing about the KPK's list of 26 suspects, Nunun soon started recalling the entire affair. As her husband told the news portal detik.com last week, the news had "unavoidably affected her state of mind."
If that was a sign for KPK officials to begin another round of questioning, they have yet to make their move.
To be sure, the KPK had the 26 names on a hit list for some time, thanks to information it obtained from the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK), the body that monitors domestic banking transactions.
Meanwhile, legal experts continue to remind the KPK that both those who bribe and those who receive bribes are equally guilty, and that it has the power to put all of them behind bars.
In the end, the biggest mystery may be: Why, two years after Agus first blew the whistle and the PPATK provided it with the evidence, is the KPK still fixated on the bribe takers and not the person who paid the bribes?
[Taufik Darusman is a veteran Jakarta-based journalist.]