Jakarta. Both candidates running for president in the July 9 election appear to have a spotless record on corruption, but the baggage brought by the parties in their respective coalitions could prove their undoing, an antigraft activist warns.
Joko Widodo, the popular governor of Jakarta, has long built up a reputation for clean and transparent governance; his rival, Prabowo Subianto, has never personally been implicated in any graft allegation, while his party, the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra), is considered one of the cleanest at the national level, in terms of officials linked to graft cases.
“But the way I see it, it’s not enough for the candidates themselves to have a strong track record in this regard,” Emerson Yuntho, the legal monitoring coordinator of Indonesia Corruption Watch, a nongovernmental organization, said on Monday. “What’s more important is that we look at the track records of their supporting parties.”
Emerson said that in this respect, Prabowo and his so-called red-and-white coalition fared poorly, with several top officials from the parties in the bloc implicated in a wide range of graft cases.
The most prominent of these is Suryadharma Ali, the chairman of the United Development Party (PPP) who was last month named a suspect by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) for the alleged embezzlement of hajj funds.
Suryadharma, whose unilateral endorsement of Prabowo sparked the worst internal rift in the PPP, subsequently resigned as minister of religious affairs, although he has refused to step down as party chief, despite mounting calls from within the PPP for him to do so.
Another of Prabowo’s supporting parties is the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), whose previous president, Luthfi Hasan Ishaaq, was in December last year sentenced to 16 years in prison for rigging the awarding of government contracts to import beef. Several other top PKS officials, including the current president, Anis Matta, have also been implicated in alleged money-laundering linked to the case, although they have not been charged.
“I see [Prabowo] as being hobbled by the corruption cases in which his coalition parties are mired,” Emerson said.
He added that Joko, backed primarily by the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle, or PDI-P, could also be held back by his party’s reputation for graft.
Though banished to the opposition for most of its existence, the PDI-P has still featured prominently in many corruption cases. It accounted for 19 of the 41 legislators jailed for taking bribes in the appointment of a senior central bank official.
US diplomatic cables published by WIkileaks also describe Taufik Kiemas, the late husband of PDI-P chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri, as engaging in “legendary corruption during his wife’s tenure” as president from 2001 to 2004.
Source/Fuente: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/indonesian-parties-graft-record-seen...
