Former antigraft chief Antasari Azhar refuted media reports that he said President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono led a high-level meeting in October 2008 to discuss a bailout plan for Bank Century the following month.

"I did not say a word about Bank Century or the bailout," Antasari said before the House of Representatives on Wednesday. "When it appeared in the media, I asked my lawyer to correct it."

In an interview aired on Aug. 18, 2012, Antasari told Metro TV that the president, and several other high-ranking officials, met one month before the government handed the ailing Bank Century a bailout that eventually totaled Rp 6.7 trillion (worth $669.2 million at the time).

"I don't know the technical details of Century... but I know that they were planning something about it," Antasari told Metro TV in an interview from prison. "At the BI meeting, there was SBY, KPK chairman, Attorney General. There was also the Coordinating Minister of Police, Legal and Security Affairs, and Finance Minister Hatta Rajasa.

"SBY said, 'There should not be a monetary crisis [in Indonesia] like 1998, like what has started to happen in other countries. To prevent it, we need a breakthrough, a global breakthrough.'"

Antasari told the Metro TV reporter that he threw his support behind the president's words. "I said, 'I support,'" he said. "Yudhoyono said, 'It is not against the law if [we] can serve the public interest.'"

Antasari's statement was widely repeated in Indonesian media, as news outlets jumped on the implication that Yudhoyono proceeded with the bailout, despite having knowledge of its potential fallout and amid widespread opposition from legislators.

But the former Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) chairman denied making a direct connection between Yudhoyono and the Bank Century bailout.

In Wednesday's hearing before the House, Antasari said that the president's only words during the meeting were, in English, "in time[s] of crisis, there must be action, [a] decision must be taken [sic.] quickly."

At the time, Antasari told the president that the KPK would support any actions taken to resolve the issue, but warned that the antigraft body would punish those involved in any violations."

The KPK, the Attorney General's Office and the police have launched parallel investigations into the bailout and the subsequent flow of money after the House of Representatives, in 2010, adopted a resolution stating that the bailout was fundamentally flawed.

But the law enforcement agencies failed to uncover any evidence of corruption. The investigators did find evidence of banking violations, which resulted in the conviction of bank owners Robert Tantular, Hesham al Warraq and Rafat Ali Rizvi, but those offenses occurred prior to the bailout.

In the wake of the bailout, lawmakers speculated that the president stepped in to help the mid-sized lender because his benefactors stood to lose huge sums of money if the bank folded.

The president acknowledged that the bailout came at a "high political cost" but was also quick to defended his administration for going forward with it.

"Channeling bailout funds of around $600 million to Bank Century had a very high political cost," he said on Friday. "But if we did not take action immediately to resolve the crisis, in a year it would have turned into an even bigger problem."

He warned that if the bank had collapsed, it would have posed a systemic threat to the rest of the country's banking sector that could have seen it crumble in a repeat of the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis. It was something he was trying to avoid at all costs, he said.

He added that he believed that his administration had handled the Bank Century case appropriately.