Abdul Khalik, Jakarta – Police have arrested a National Land Agency (BPN) director on charges he forged a land certificate, a case analysts say is the first of many more to come involving the state agency.
Elfachri Budiman, BPN director for land disputes, was officially detained Thursday evening, National Police deputy chief of detectives Insp. Gen. Paulus Purwoko said Friday.
He said the suspect was being held responsible for duplicating a valid land certificate that had been given as collateral to the now-defunct Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency (BPPN).
"The suspect issued a fake certificate which was a duplicate of the original one at the BPPN. So, there are no longer two certificates now for the same plot of land," Paulus said.
The forgery scandal began when Sudarto, an executive of Pesona Bank – which was being placed under the auspices of the BPPN at the height of the 1998 financial crisis – made a copy of the original certificate – for two plots of land in Medan, North Sumatra – before handing them over to the BPPN.
Sudarto, who was sentenced to 16 months' imprisonment in 2005, asked Elfachri, the then North Sumatra land agency chairman, to issue fake certificates for the two plots of land, which were 682 and 542 square meters in size, respectively.
Sudarto planned to use the duplicate certificates as collateral to obtain bank loans. Paulus said Elfachri then received bribes worth millions of rupiah from Sudarto for the same service. "He could face seven years in jail based on the prevailing law," he said.
Observers were quick to suspect the scandal was just the tip of the iceberg in land certificate fabrication cases involving the BPN.
"It is a dark side of our land management. The case underscores common practices of certificate counterfeiting, in which BPN officials took bribes to issue fake land documents for businesspeople and other individuals or groups," legal expert Irman Putra Sidin said.
He urged the government to use the arrest of the BPN high-ranking official as "momentum" to clean up the institution, saying land problems concerned all citizens.
"This is the highest (ranked) official ever arrested. Land certificate fabrication (cases) never get attention as many feel they are issues that concern individuals. But the fact is they concern all of us," Irman said.
The BPN revealed recently it was handling thousands of certificate fabrication cases. By the end of 2007, the agency was struggling to sort out more than 7,000 public complaints about land certificate fabrications, leading to 99 criminal cases handled by the police.
Officials in almost every province have been arrested by the police in the last five years for similar charges.
In 2003, Bandung land agency head Iwa Ruhiwa was arrested by West Java police for counterfeiting certificates for a number of plots of land, while in the following year, Jakarta land agency head Robert Lumampouw was detained for issuing fake certificates for 4.9 hectares of land in Ulujami, South Jakarta.
The police also arrested Surabaya's BPN head I Gde Ariyuda for a similar crime. Despite the arrests, land document forgeries have continued to plague the BPN.