Vaudine England, Jakarta – The World Bank says it knew of allegations concerning misuse of its money to fund East Timor militias but found no evidence when it checked the claims last June. Indonesian bureaucrats named in an Australian television documentary broadcast on Wednesday have, so far, remained silent.

"The allegations made in the programme are serious – but they are not new," said Mark Baird, country director for the World Bank in Indonesia. "We heard the same allegations and saw the same documents in June last year.

"We investigated the allegations immediately – as did the Government of Indonesia – and found no evidence that World Bank funds were used in East Timor for political campaigning or by the militias," he said.

The bank's deputy director, Ben Fisher, said on the programme: "My specific reaction and the reaction of my colleagues in government is that we were very upset."

The Dateline documentary showed civil servants finding key documents in the rubble of their offices in Dili, East Timor, but the bank claims some of the translations of the documents, referring specifically to World Bank funds, were false.

"Nor have we seen any evidence to suggest that the US$500 million disbursed by the World Bank in June of last year was in any way linked to spending on government programmes in East Timor," Mr Baird said in Jakarta. He said the Indonesian Government fund was running a cash surplus for the fiscal year at the time and "had substantial cash on hand to fund its own programmes without World Bank support".

However, the documentary's claim that Indonesian government money was used to fund the establishment and operations of the militias which wreaked havoc in East Timor remains unanswered.

In the programme, Indonesia's then foreign minister, Ali Alatas, denied the charges. "We ... got to know about this and we stopped it immediately," he said.

But the Finance Ministry official interviewed was emphatic that cheques kept arriving and that special procedures were ordered to get the money to militia bosses quickly.