Irawaty Wardany, Jakarta – The Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) has warned it would be harder to probe possible graft cases against legislators elected in 2009, since they are not required under the new election law to report their wealth.
The KPK voiced regret that the new 2008 election laws do not oblige legislative candidates to report their wealth to the General Elections Commission (KPU).
"Unlike the 2003 legislative election laws, the new law does not stipulate any obligation for candidates to report their wealth to the KPU," M. Sigit, the KPK director dealing wealth reports of state officials, said Friday.
He said it was really disappointing that the new election law would not allow the public to measure the transparency and honesty of legislative candidates.
Based on the previous election law all candidates were obliged to report their wealth to the KPU, which later forwarded the reports to the KPK.
This made it easier for the KPK to carry out reverse verification when the anti-graft commission found indications of corruption linked to legislators elected in the 2004 elections, Sigit said.
However, he said, legislators elected in the upcoming elections would still be subject to the 1999 law on public officials that requires them to report their wealth to the Examination Commission.
But political expert Boni Hargens from the University of Indonesia said lawmakers could avoid this obligation because this law only stipulated public officials, but did not specifically mention legislators.
"The lawmakers who created this law were really smart. We should admit that. This will make corruption cases, which we can see involve many lawmakers themselves, harder to prove," he said.
Boni said most corruption cases, especially bribery cases, were proven through reverse verification and that would be harder to carry out now that current legislative candidates would not be required to report their wealth before being elected.
"This is the 'game' being played by the lawmakers who enacted the law," he said.
Boni questioned why none of the (interested) non-governmental organizations put enough emphasis on this issue prior to the law's enactment. "What we can do now is to propose a judicial review on the law," he added.
He urged non-governmental organizations to urgently file a request for the Constitutional Court to review the law. "We cannot possibly expect the proposal to come from the members of the House of Representatives".