Heru Andriyanto – President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono must appoint a new attorney general to replace Hendarman Supandji, who has failed to effectively support the government's anticorruption drive, Indonesia Corruption Watch said on Sunday.

The group said that under Hendarman's leadership, the Attorney General's Office "has misled the direction of the country's antigraft campaign" by focusing on unimportant figures while allowing the major players to go free.

A recent ICW survey in nine provinces, including Jakarta, indicates that only 3.5 percent of graft suspects charged by district prosecutors are from the "upper management."

"This is also true for the AGO, especially when certain political and business powers are involved," ICW researcher Febri Diansyah said.

Also during Hendarman's tenure, the AGO adopted a controversial policy of not detaining graft suspects if they agreed to return the stolen money, and dropped numerous cases involving high-profile figures.

Over the last two years alone, the AGO has cleared business tycoons Sjamsul Nursalim and Tan Kian, former Pertamina executives Ariffi Nawawi and Alfred Rohimone, former minister Laksamana Sukardi and former President Suharto's son, Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra, of corruption charges.

"The AGO often argued that they had dropped cases because of the lack of evidence, because there was no state loss or because those cases were civil cases, not criminal," Febri said.

"This is unacceptable because any case must undergo scrutiny before it enters the prosecution stage, and in some major cases the attorney general himself decides whether or not the case will be prosecuted," Febri said.