An international environmental group that documented illegal logging activities linked to a rogue police officer in Papua has welcomed the decision by antigraft investigators to probe the case.
The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency made the statement in response to an announcement by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) that it would investigate allegations that Adj. First Insp. Labora Sitorus, an officer with the Sorong district police in West Papua province, kicked back sums amounting to $1 million to senipr officers between January and April this year.
"We warmly welcome the KPK's intervention in the Labora Sitorus case," Faith Doherty, the head of the EIA's forest campaign, said in the statement.
"Police corruption has facilitated the illegal decimation of Indonesia's forests for years and undermined the government's wider efforts to reform the timber trade. EIA has been campaigning for real enforcement against those such as Labora Sitorus for over a decade; perhaps, with the KPK involvement, justice may finally be served in this one case."
The EIA describes Labora as "a key timber smuggling kingpin [who] controlled the illegal merbau wood trade in West Papua, Indonesia's last significant forested region."
He was arrested in May after the police revealed that the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK), the government's anti-money-laundering watchdog, had traced transactions worth Rp 1.5 trillion ($134.8 million) passing through his bank accounts between 2007 and 2012.
The money was believed to be linked to his alleged fuel smuggling and illegal logging activities. Among the evidence seized were 115 shipping containers – traced to one of Labora's companies, Rotua, and bound for China – holding a total of 2,264 cubic meters of merbau wood, a rare hardwood prohibited for commercial logging and for export as rough-sawn timber.
In May, the EIA released video footage of illegal loggers harvesting merbau and other species for Rotua from forests on Batanta Island in the Raja Ampat archipelago of West Papua, an ecologically important area with high biodiversity. Rotua also reportedly received timber from the forests of Sorong, Aimas, Bintuni and other regions of West Papua, the EIA said.
In releasing the footage, EIA called on the KPK to investigate police corruption in the case, following the collapse of previous similar cases of police involvement in the illegal merbau trade in West Papua.
Revelations have emerged that Labora transferred about $1 million in multiple payments to police chiefs between January and April 2013.
The EIA says his network transferred approximately $100,000 to the National Police headquarters in Jakarta and a similar sum to the Papua province police chief. Further multiple payments amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars were made to local chiefs of police in Raja Ampat, Sorong, Aimas and Bintuni districts – all sources of the illegal timber smuggled by Labora's gang.
While his lawyers claim the transfers are "gratuities," the KPK has pledged to investigate the payments as clear indications of high-level police corruption.
While much of the attention in the case so far has been focused on Labora, sources in the police force say most of the money was being kicked up the chain of command to senior officers in exchange for being allowed to operate unhindered for years.
"Indonesia's international timber customers, particularly the European Union, Australia and the United States, can have little confidence in forest sector reform until corrupt police profiting from illegal logging and timber smuggling are seen to be held accountable," Doherty said.
"Indonesia's people, forests and biodiversity have a bleak future if the rule of the jungle continues to trump the rule of law."