Jakarta – The country's top antigraft and auditing bodies called for a review of asset forfeiture and corruption court laws to grant them more authority to prosecute graft suspects.
This new authority, including the ability to freeze and confiscate all assets of a suspect, as well as reversing the burden of proof, would leave suspects with a smaller chance of escaping charges.
Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) deputy chairman M. Jasin said seizing the assets of state officials who failed to account for their dubious extra income could deter corruption.
"The absence of a severe penalty in the existing laws means state officials can be careless about disclosing the source of their wealth," Jasin said after a seminar Saturday.
Currently, no law allows for the investigation of illicit enrichment. The antigraft body is obliged to follow procedures based on the KPK law and the good governance law, which only rule that government officials, including those from state-owned enterprises, make a formal disclosure of their wealth before, during, and after their appointment to a position.
If asset forfeiture was allowed, state officials would immediately be deemed to have enriched themselves illicitly if they could not reasonably explain the significant increase in their assets in relation to their declared income.
Jasin said these new mechanisms were important, especially in complicated corruption cases such as the recent tax scam of Gayus Tambunan.
Gayus, a low-ranking tax official, is charged with receiving money from several companies to lower their tax bills. He also bribed police, prosecutors and a judge to have the graft case against him overturned.
Recently, he also admitted to bribing prison officials to allow him to leave his cell on multiple occasions.
The ineffective supervision of state officials' assets meant antigraft officials could not expose the case earlier. With Gayus now dragging many others down with him, antigraft authorities run the risk of losing track of financial transactions.
Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK) chairman Yunus Husein said there were two ways to confiscate illegally gained assets.
"We could impose a system to seize illicitly gained assets for those officials who cannot account for a significant increase in their wealth," he said, referring to an item being deliberated for the corruption court bill.
"This could be put in place before the official goes to trial." The other tool was a "non-conviction based on asset forfeiture", Yunus said, as was proposed in the asset forfeiture bill. "The assets would be confiscated after the suspect is sentenced."
Both methods require that the burden of proof lie not with prosecutors, but with the suspects, Yunus said. Jasin said the KPK could not probe many suspect asset disclosure reports because the burden of proof lay with them.
Recently, several high-ranking police officials dodged a KPK investigation into their suspiciously large bank accounts.
A draft of the asset forfeiture law is one of the priorities of the House of Representatives, while the corruption court draft bill is still being supervised by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra) legislator Martin Hutabarat from the House's Commission on legal, security and human rights affairs, said he supported the idea, adding that a strong deterrent was needed to eliminate corruption. (ipa)