Ary Hermawan, Jakarta – Planned revisions of political laws should include amendments to regulations on campaign funding to prevent corruption in future elections, a leading graft watchdog says.
"We have to find a way to make sure that political parties are transparent financially," Ibrahim Fahmy Badoh, political corruption division head at Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW), said Friday.
He was speaking at the launch of his book Corruption and Elections, co-written with Lucky Djani and published by the ICW.
The 164-page book looks at corruption in the 2004 general election, suggesting it was widespread and that parties had been found to have manipulated reports of their campaign funds.
It also states that parties required members and other individuals to pay hundreds of millions of rupiah to earn a ticket for nomination in the legislative elections.
"The (tickets) for nomination were sold to legislative candidates at high prices," the books says. The practice has led to corrupt elected officials who spend most of their terms in debt politically, analysts have said.
The book focuses on the major political parties, particularly Golkar and the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, which it says manipulates or covers up the identities of its donors, both individual and corporate. As power holders, the two parties have greater access to bigger sources of funding, and as a result are more prone to corruption, the book says.
During the 2004 presidential election, the ICW discovered some parties using fictitious addresses as well as the identities of dead people as fronts for donations from unclear sources.
"'Unclear' means the funds could come from people or companies that refused to be named – or they could come from illegal sources or crime," Ibrahim said.
A study conducted by the ICW in Jakarta, Semarang in Central Java, Samardina in East Kalimantan, Lampung and Makassar in South Sulawesi revealed that irregularities in campaign funding during the 2004 legislative election reached Rp 13.6 billion.
An audit on campaign funds reported by political parties for the presidential election showed that around 30 percent of each candidate's funds came from unclear sources.
"In the future, there should be a regulation following up the findings of such audits to guarantee that the financing is accountable," he said.
He said bad campaign funding would pave the way for corrupt politicians to enter the legislative and executive bodies, warning that illegal funding would result in corrupt policies and cronyism.
Ibrahim also said he was concerned by the poor enforcement of anti-corruption law during the 2004 elections. "So far no punishments have been imposed on parties committing bribery or 'money politics'," he said.
"This is due to the unclear definition of corruption in elections. It is easy for them to get away," he said. Researcher Bob Dahl at the International Foundation for Election Systems said political financing and transparency was a difficult problem throughout the world, including in countries with advanced democracies.