Jakarta – The Attorney General's Office (AGO) is confident a Guernsey court will grant full disclosure and an extension of a freezing order on the allegedly ill-gotten funds of former president Soeharto's son Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra.
"I'm hoping we'll win. Let's see Thursday, they have impartial judges there," said Yosef Suardi Sabda, the AGO's civilian case director for state administrative cases, on Monday.
The British Royal Court in Guernsey, a British crown dependency off the northern French coast, will decide Wednesday on the government's request for a full disclosure of the case and a freezing order extension on US$46 million belonging to Tommy, which is being held at the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) Paribas in Guernsey.
The requests – a form of legal intervention – came after the bank refused to release the money, citing the possibility that it was obtained through graft. Tommy's Garnet Investment Ltd., the company the money was deposited on behalf of, then brought the bank to trial seeking the money's release.
The AGO said it had submitted documents asserting that the money – claimed by Tommy to have been collected through the sale of his shares in automotive company Lamborghini – was in fact laundered.
The AGO believes the funds were part of a sum collected through illegitimate means during the reign of Tommy's father, Soeharto, in an era spanning three decades when corruption practices were rife.
"If the government wins, we can withdraw the money through legal and civil avenues. The civil avenue can be worked out in either Indonesia or Guernsey, while the legal one is by demanding funds to substitute the state's loss," Yosef was quoted as saying by detik.com news portal.
Full disclosure of the case would mean that the court will expose the origin and flow of the funds in question, which have been frozen since Jan. 22.
Tommy's head legal representative for the Guernsey trial, O.C. Kaligis, said he had prepared 800 pages of documents stating that the funds were legitimate and free from corruption.
The case surfaced in the wake of the disclosure of another case involving Tommy and $10 million that he withdrew from BNP Paribas in London using a government account at the Justice and Human Rights Ministry's Directorate General of General Legal Administration.
The money, withdrawn in February 2005, is claimed to belong to another of Tommy's companies, Motorbike Corp. The withdrawal was cleared with the alleged approval of Yusril Ihza Mahendra and Hamid Awaluddin.
Yusril was justice and human rights minister when the request for clearance from BNP Paribas was made. He authorized the transfer, but was replaced by Hamid just prior to the withdrawal taking place. Both were recently dismissed in last week's Cabinet reshuffle.
Legal experts have insisted that the use of a government account for private means constitutes money laundering and violates the 2003 UN anti-corruption convention and the 2003 money laundering law.