The jailing of a rogue tax official whose exploits shocked Indonesia will do little to improve Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s standing as a corruption fighter, analysts said.
Gayus Tambunan, 31, who managed to amass US$3.1 million despite being on a wage of just several hundred dollars a week, was jailed for seven years on Wednesday after a trial packed with sensational revelations.
Tambunan said he helped dozens of corporations — including some belonging to the family of one of Indonesia’s most powerful politicians, Golkar party president Aburizal Bakrie — evade hundreds of millions of dollars in tax.
He also admitted bribing prison guards to release him from his remand cell for dozens of “vacations,” and produced a fake passport for trips to Singapore, Malaysia and Macau when he was supposed to be behind bars.
On one occasion, the tubby taxman was caught on camera wearing a wig at a tennis tournament in Bali while officials said he was secure in his cell in Jakarta.
Indonesia Corruption Watch deputy coordinator Emerson Yuntho said the authorities’ handling of the Gayus case undermined Yudhoyono’s election promises to crack down on corruption.
He said there were many different interests caught up in the Gayus case.
“There will be many people under fire if the authorities investigate further the people surrounding the case,” he said.
A recent report by the Indonesian Survey Institute showed the public’s perception of the war on corruption was nose-diving.
It found only 34 percent of respondents trusted the government’s efforts compared with 83 percent a year earlier.
In an effort to reassert his stature as a graft-fighter, Yudhoyono on Monday issued new directives to strengthen anti-corruption investigators.
He also instructed them to probe the 149 companies Tambunan said paid hefty bribes to dodge their tax obligations.
Yudhoyono’s directive is backed by none other than Tambunan’s defense lawyer, Adnan Buyung Nasution, who argued that his client is just a small player in the underworld of Indonesian corruption.
“The big fish are all the 149 companies,” he said.“Why don’t you just arrest all of them?”
Tambunan, whose antics have helped him garner celebrity status in a country inured to all but the most spectacular graft scandals, has offered to play a role in cleaning up Indonesia’s tarnished image.
“Make me an advisor to the national police chief, attorney general and the KPK [anti-graft commission] chairman and I promise that within two years Indonesia will be clean,” he told the court.
“I would not just go after the small fish, but also the sharks and the whales,” he said.
Political analyst Arbi Sanit said the Tambunan case highlighted the president’s seemingly insurmountable task in tackling corruption.
“People like Gayus are scary. They threaten the system of government, the political, economic and value systems in this country,” Sanit said.
Indonesia scored 2.8 out of 10 in Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perceptions Index for last year, ranking it 110th out of 178 countries.
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