Crescent Star Party (PBB) advisory board head Yusril Ihza Mahendra announced his candidacy for the 2014 presidential election on Sunday, casting himself as an underdog in a speech delivered before hundreds of supporters in Indonesia’s second-largest city, a stronghold for the small Islamic party.
Yusril, a prominent lawyer and a law professor at University of Indonesia, told the party’s supporters that he was prepared for a tough fight in the election. The party currently currently holds no seats in the House of Representatives. Under Indonesian election law a candidate can only run in the presidential election if they receive the support of 20 percent of the House, or if the parties supporting the candidate receive 25 percent of the votes in the legislative election.
“This is a mandate and I have to be ready to go for it, even though it will be difficult,” Yusril said, according to the state-run Antara News Agency. “I have been supported by people for a long time who demanded I run in the election. They have agreed to struggle [through this] with me.”
He promised to uphold the integrity of the nation’s legal system, which has been tainted in recent months by the arrest of former Constitutional Court chief justice Akil Mochtar over corruption allegations and a riot at the courthouse.
Yusril will likely face tremendous odds to earn a spot on the 2014 presidential ticket under the 2008 Law on Presidential Elections, but the attorney has filed for a judicial review challenging that regulation, he said.
“We hope that by January, there will be a certain ruling by the court allowing all political parties to nominate their own presidential and vice-presidential candidates,” he said.
The attorney is a divisive figure in Indonesian politics. He served as a speech writer for four Indonesian presidents, was once the nation’s justice and human rights minister and previously worked as state secretary for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
He has also made a career out of defending some of Indonesia’s biggest corruption suspects — a decision that, in one instance, reportedly cost the attorney a government position.
Yusril’s efforts to defend Tommy Soeharto during an investigation into a host of corruption allegations — including the failed project to rebrand a South Korean car as Indonesia’s national car the “Timor” — are rumored to have ended his career in President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s administration.
Yusril’s law firm fought to unfreeze Tommy’s assets held in the French bank Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP) Paribas, allowing the then-corruption suspect to empty several accounts alleged to contain as much as $50 million. The wealth, which was alleged at the time to have been obtained through several projects of disputed legal standing, under his father’s New Order regime, was under investigation at the time.
The allegations were not proven in court and Tommy was able to recover the assets.
Yusril was unable to escape the blowback and was quietly moved on from his post in 2007 without an official explanation.
One year later, Yusril was back in the spotlight when the Attorney General’s Office charged him with allegedly embezzling 90 percent of the funds generated by a business registration website, known as Sisminbakum. That case was overturned on appeal after the Supreme Court ruled that the missing funds were not government revenue and, therefore, could not cause losses to the state.
He has since campaigned for harsher drug laws and represented numerous high-profile graft suspects — including three-star police general Susno Duadji during his unsuccessful attempt to avoid serving a three years, six months prison sentence.
Source/Fuente:http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/yusril-and-crescent-star-party-throw...
