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Soeharto family foundation pleads poverty in face of fine
Jakarta Post - January 30, 2016
The deadline for the fine payment was set for Friday, eight days after the South Jakarta District Court convened a meeting attended by representatives from the foundation and the Attorney General's Office (AGO) to discuss the penalty.
The court has the authority to seize the foundation's assets if it fails to pay the fine on time. However, the Supersemar Foundation's lawyer, Denny Kailimang, insisted it could not pay the fine because it did not have the money.
"We do not have that much money. All the money we received from state-owned banks went straight to the scholarships given to students," he told The Jakarta Post on Friday.
Denny said that an audit conducted by the AGO in 1998 revealed that the foundation only controlled assets worth Rp 309 billion. "We only have Rp 309 billion and if [the court] wants to confiscate that, fine. However, we do not have the [Rp 4.4 trillion] they are asking of us," he said.
The case dates back to 2008 when the AGO filed a lawsuit at the South Jakarta District Court accusing the Soeharto family and the foundation of misusing scholarship funds by diverting them to family-owned companies, including Bank Duta in 1990 and PT Sempati Air from 1989 to 1997.
The South Jakarta District Court found the foundation guilty and ordered it to pay a penalty. The Supreme Court upheld the decision in 2010 and demanded that the foundation pay $315 million and Rp 139.2 billion, which together amounts to Rp 4.4 trillion in current valuations.
However, an earlier decision by the lower court contained a typographical error, stating that the rupiah portion of the ordered payment should be only Rp 139.2 million, instead of Rp 139.2 billion.
Members of the Soeharto family confirmed that the foundation had given up on trying to pay the fine. Siti "Titiek" Hediati Hariyadi, Soeharto's daughter, said the foundation was currently strapped for cash. "[The foundation's funds] are insufficient. There simply isn't that sort of money," she said.
Titiek also denied that her family had siphoned off money meant for scholarships and maintained that the funds had been properly disbursed to approximately 2 million scholarship recipients, all from low-income families.
Meanwhile, South Jakarta District Court spokesman I Made Sutrisna confirmed that the Supersemar Foundation had not paid the fine and said that since the deadline had passed, the court would wait for the asset calculation results from the AGO, which first filed the lawsuit.
"Since the deadline has passed, we are now waiting for data from the filer of the lawsuit to ascertain whether or not [the Supersemar Foundation] currently has any assets that can be used to pay the fine," he told the Post.
There was however, no deadline for the AGO to submit such data. "There is no deadline for the submission, it is totally up to the lawsuit filer's initiative," Made said, adding that the court could not lawfully confiscate any assets without the AGO's audit results.
Separately, Attorney General HM Prasetyo said that the AGO was still calculating Supersemar's assets to determine if the foundation had the capacity to pay the fine.
He said the AGO would submit the data to the court if requested. "When [the data] is needed, we will submit it [to the court]. It is possible that we will send it [next week]," he said at the AGO headquarters in South Jakarta.
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