The former president commissioner of Bank Modern, Samadikun Hartono, fled Indonesia back in 2004 in after being found guilty of embezzling IDR169 billion (US$12 million) in state funds that had been met to bail out his bank following the 1997 financial crisis. He was finally arrested in 2016 during an F1 race in Shanghai and returned to Indonesia to face his punishment.
Since then, the government has been trying to recover the money Samadikun stole from the state so many years ago. And before today they had only managed to extract about IDR81 billion from him and only after a great deal legal wrangling over ownership of his assets.
But, just this afternoon, the sum Samadikun owed has been nearly completely recovered thanks to the efforts of law enforcement officials and a massive shipment of cold, hard cash that arrived at Bank Mandiri HQ in Jakarta this afternoon.
“The Central Jakarta District Attorney has restored the state’s finances by depositing IDR87 billion in replacement payment from the convict Samadikun Hartono,” Nirwan Nawawi, the head of the Jakarta Criminal Investigation Office, told Detik today.
According Nirwan, the money was derived from the sale of Samadikun’s assets. The reason the payment was sent to the bank in cash before being deposited into state coffers is a symbolic move, presumably to help people visualize just how much he and other corruptors had stolen and highlight the government’s success in recovering those funds.
While the table full IDR100k bills stacks is impressive, we had been hoping the amount would be delivered in the form of IDR500 coins that they can use them to fill a swimming pool and somebody could do this:
That would be a far more powerful (and fun!) symbol of the immense toll corruption has taken from Indonesia.
But even though the cash payment isn’t swimmable, we agree with the government’s PR strategy of giving people the visual to symbolize their anti-corruption efforts. While there is still a huge amount of endemic graft plaguing the government, people also need to recognize successes like this and the guilty verdict given to former house speaker Setya Novanto so that confidence and support in the country’s Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and other anti-graft institutions continue to grow and attempts by other forces in the government to undercut their power won’t be successful.
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