JAKARTA: President Prabowo Subianto has said he might pardon people who engaged in graft if they return what they stole to underline his commitment to tackling corruption; a plan that’s efficiency to recover state losses was immediately questioned by observers.
Speaking before hundreds of Indonesian university students in Cairo on Wednesday (Dec 18) during his visit to Egypt, Prabowo said he would implement a plan to retrieve ill-gotten gains in the coming weeks or months.
“Hey, you corrupters, or those who have stolen from the people. If you return what you stole, we might forgive you. But please return it,” Prabowo said. He did not give details on his plan, but said his government might provide ways for wrongdoers to discreetly return what was stolen.
Antigraft activists were quick to raise their eyebrows upon hearing the President’s statement, suggesting that pardoning graft suspects and convicts could harm the country’s effort to fight corruption.
“While the President may have good intentions, the idea contradicts the prevailing Anticorruption Law, which mandates that returning state losses doesn’t eliminate the crime,” said Zaenur Rohman of the Gadjah Mada University’s Center for Anticorruption Studies (Pukat UGM).
“Rather than offering pardons, the government should instead create an effective instrument to encourage anticorruption [efforts] and support firm and tough actions against graft suspects.”
Rather than pardoning graft convicts, Zaenur suggested that the government consider adopting a deferred prosecution agreement, an approach under which parties charged with a criminal offence can reach an agreement with prosecutors to have their legal proceedings suspended in exchange for several conditions being met, such as payment of a financial penalty and compensation.
“The state can benefit more from not only the return of stolen state assets, but also a high fine on graft perpetrators,” Zaenur said, while asserting that such an approach should only be applied to graft-committing corporations rather than individuals.
Boosting asset recovery could also be achieved through legislation by overhauling the prevailing 2001 Anticorruption Law to criminalise illicit enrichment.
Policymakers could also pass the long-overdue asset forfeiture bill to repatriate stolen assets taken abroad. The asset bill has been gestating for more than two presidential terms since it was dropped from the House of Representatives’ priority legislation list in 2012.
Prabowo took office on Oct 20 and vowed to eradicate corruption and introduce a “realistic” approach to preventing it by increasing the wages of state officials entrusted with large budgets.
Experts highlighted a slowdown in Indonesia’s anticorruption drive during the 10-year administration of his predecessor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo.
The country showed no improvement in Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perception Index, with a score of 34; a number identical to the previous year and below the global average of 43.
Prabowo’s amnesty idea follows his decision last week to pardon about 44,000 prisoners, about 30 per cent of the country’s prison population.
The planned pardon is to be given to various convicts, from drug offenders and activists convicted of defamation to people jailed in the restive province of Papua for criticising the government.
Prabowo also warned any Indonesian who received incentives offered by the state to “pay their obligation”.
“As long as you pay your obligation, abiding by the law, then we will look to the future, we will not bring up what happened in the past,” he said, without elaborating.
As an effort to add to the state coffers, Indonesia under Jokowi had a tax amnesty programme under which the government provided opportunities for individuals to declare obligations or assets they had not paid tax on, in a move aimed at boosting tax compliance.
Carried out in 2016, the first tax amnesty managed to uncover more than Rp 4.8 quadrillion (US$297 billion) in hidden assets and yielded more than Rp 114 trillion in tax liabilities. A second iteration in 2022 was deemed a failure, having uncovered Rp 594 trillion in hidden assets, or about one-eighth of the previous tax amnesty.
Lawmakers have put forward a third iteration of the tax amnesty program as a priority legislation programme for next year, but activists do not believe it can help the government recover lost tax revenue.
