Jakarta – The Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said on Friday that the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) should expand its list of suspects in the Religious Affairs Ministry's graft-ridden Koran procurement scandal to include more politicians who may have used the funds for their political parties.
"Looking at parallels from similar corruption scandals in the past, we have reason to believe that the money wasn't just used to enrich the pockets of alleged suspects," ICW political corruption researcher Ade Irawan said. "We think the money was also used to empower political parties."
These past scandals, he said, included the Regional Infrastructure Adjustment Fund (DPID) money-laundering case and the SEA Games athletes' village bribery project, both from 2011. Ade said that suspects in both cases and others similar to it didn't only use the money they pilfered to line their own pockets.
"They also used the money to fund political campaigns, like when [former Democratic Party treasurer Muhammad] Nazaruddin said that graft money was used to fund [Democratic Party chairman] Anas Urbaningrum's campaign to become party chairman [during the 2010 Democratic Party congress in Bandung]," Ade said.
Ade hopes that examples such as these will spur on the KPK to take their investigations beyond the two suspects in the Rp 55 billion (US$5.88 million) Koran scandal who have already been identified.
The two are Golkar Party lawmaker Zulkarnaen Djabar and his son, Dendi Prasetya. Zulkarnaen is reported to have gained Rp 4 billion (US$424,000) after his son's printing firm, PT KSAI, won the procurement tender.
"The KPK should open itself to all possibilities. We have reason to believe that even the ministerial elite and bureaucracy are involved," he said. Ade said that corruption involving such a wide range of actors occurred because of the way politicians conceived political parties.
"For some politicians, political parties are like corporations. They're tools for profit. If the parties are the corporations, then the politicians are the stock owners," he said.
"The more money they channel into their 'corporations', the more powerful their 'investments' become. The more powerful the corporation, the more money these politicians can make in the future."
Ade said this view was a far cry from the way such institutions were theoretically envisioned. "Political parties have to answer to their constituents, the people. They have to respond to the public's problems and desires," he said.
Aside from the fraudulent Koran procurement, the Religious Affairs Ministry is also reported to have allegedly misused Rp 18 billion out of an approximate Rp 30 billion that was allotted to procure computers for laboratories at Madrassa Tsanawiyah (junior Islamic high schools) last year.
An official with the ministry's religious education division, Sastra Juanda, admitted that the ministry had planned to spend the money on upgrading all laboratories at all public Islamic high schools, adding that the ministry would arrange a similar procurement worth Rp 50 billion this year. (png)