Indonesian oil tycoon Riza Chalid named suspect in Pertamina corruption case
JAKARTA: The Attorney General's Office (AGO) has named oil tycoon Muhammad Riza Chalid a suspect in a corruption case pertaining to fuel imports at subsidiaries of state-owned oil and gas giant Pertamina that incurred trillions in state losses.
Investigators at the Office of the Assistant Attorney General for Extraordinary Crimes (Jampidsus) found enough evidence to name the businessman a suspect amid their investigation into the case in which seven suspects were arrested in February.
Among the suspects previously arrested by the AGO was Riza's son Kerry Adrianto, a beneficial owner of a private oil and gas shipping company. Riza, identified as the beneficial owner of PT Tangki Merak and PT Orbit Terminal Merak (OTM), allegedly agreed on a deal with Pertamina to lease the Merak fuel terminal in Banten at a time when the state oil and gas company did not require additional storage.
He allegedly did so by intervening in Pertamina's governance policy, scrapped the Merak fuel terminal's asset ownership scheme in the contract and inflated its value, AGO spokesperson Harli Siregar said during a press briefing on Thursday (July 10).
Investigators suspect that Riza conspired with then Pertamina supply and distribution vice president Alfian Nasution and marketing and trading director Hanung Budya and OTM president director Gading Ramadhan Joedo; the latter has been in AGO custody since February.
Riza, Alfian and Hanung were among nine suspects named by the AGO on Thursday for allegedly causing state losses of up to Rp 285 trillion (US$17 billion) through irregularities in fuel trade planning and procurement, product compensation schemes and the below-market sale of non-subsidised diesel to private and state-owned enterprises. The estimated state losses were raised from a previous Rp 196 trillion when the AGO made the first wave of arrests in February.
All suspects were arrested on Thursday, except for Riza who remains at large. AGO investigators believe that he is currently residing in Singapore.
'Riza failed to respond to three summonses for interrogation, but we have been coordinating with our representatives in Singapore to locate and bring him in,' Jampidsus investigation director Abdul Qohar said in Thursday's televised press briefing.
Should Riza be found to reside in Singapore, the AGO may utilise a treaty between the city state and Indonesia that grants extradition for various offences, including corruption, money laundering and bribery, according to the laws of both countries and safeguards provided in the agreement.
Indonesian authorities have used the treaty in an attempt to secure the return of Paulus Tannos, a businessman who was named a suspect in another high-profile graft case involving e-ID procurement. But the effort has yet to bear fruit, as Tannos has challenged Indonesia's extradition request in a Singaporean court.
The AGO said that it had been looking into Riza's potential involvement in the Pertamina graft case since it arrested his son Kerry in February. The initial investigation revealed that the illicit scheme allegedly involved the procurement of lower-octane subsidised gasoline to be sold fraudulently at a higher price.
The Pertamina case was not the first scandal to hit Riza, a longtime player in the country's oil trade who was known as the 'gasoline godfather' for his domination of the oil import business.
He was previously linked to a case in 2008 involving the import of 600,000 barrels of mixed crude oil sold by his company Global Energy Resource to Petral, a trading firm owned by Pertamina. The case allegedly caused the state energy firm to lose some Rp 65 billion, but the investigation was later dropped by the police after they claimed no state losses had been incurred.
The businessman later found himself at the center of another scandal in 2015. At that time, he and then-House of Representatives speaker Setya Novanto of the Golkar Party sought shares and projects from gold miner PT Freeport Indonesia in exchange for using his supposed influence over then-president Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo to secure a contract extension for the company. There was no formal criminal investigation into Riza or Setya in that scandal, which became known by the public as "papa minta saham" (daddy wants shares).
Energy watchdog Centre of Energy and Resources Indonesia (CERI) lauded the AGO for naming Riza a suspect in the Pertamina corruption case and expressed the hope that investigators can successfully arrest him.
'Wherever he is now, we believe authorities will bring him in to hold him accountable,' CERI executive director Yusri Usman said in a statement on Friday, while conveying the hope that the AGO could expand the investigation to other suspects.
The fuel import case has been seen as a test for President Prabowo Subianto, who has vowed that his government will not tolerate corruption and has threatened hefty prison sentences for offenders. When the AGO named nine suspects in the case in February, analysts urged the President to take direct action to dismantle the deeply entrenched corruption in the country's oil and gas business. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
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