Made Arya Kencana & Rizky Amelia, Denpasar – A financial transaction watchdog has found 2,300 potentially problematic bank accounts belonging to heads of regional administrations or their families, its former chairman said on Thursday.
"It is not yet known whether there are any [illegally] fat accounts among them," Yunus Husein said on the sidelines of a seminar on regional financial management in Bali.
Yunus said hundreds of the suspected problematic accounts in the names of regional heads or their families were being investigated by the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK).
Any irregularities in the accounts, he said, would be evident in the way the money was moved among them. "[The funds] are usually only moved around between the accounts of the wife, their children or other relatives," Yunus said.
He cautioned that not all of the suspicious accounts flagged necessarily involved corruption, and said the investigation would eventually make it clear which were innocent.
Meanwhile, Isran Noor, the head of the Association of Municipality Governments of Indonesia (Apkasi), said regional leaders were now concerned that they could potentially be accused of corruption because of an administrative error. He said unjustified suspicion could damage their careers even if they were eventually cleared.
"Once they have been summoned by the prosecutors' office or the police, the case gets complicated and they can no longer work comfortably," Isran said. He also objected to the PPATK's surveillance of bank accounts, arguing that bank customers had the right to privacy.
Yunus, however, said the PPATK had the legal authority to investigate suspicious accounts. He added that the PPATK never released names, and said that if any were leaked to the press, the information must have come from other sources.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), Johan Budi, said the commission had not yet received any reports from the PPATK regarding the suspicious bank accounts.
He said that because the KPK was busy addressing a significant backlog of cases, the commission could not take the initiative to request a report from the PPATK.
Among the cases currently under KPK investigation are those of nine high-ranking officials at the Finance Ministry found to have unusually large balances in their bank accounts. The reports about the accounts in question also came from the PPATK.
In February, the center said more than 1,800 questionably large bank accounts had been detected since 2003. These included 707 accounts held by civil servants, 89 by police officers, 12 by prosecutors, 17 by judges, 65 by lawmakers and one by a KPK official.