White-collar crimes without criminals

Indonesia is the land of Almighty God, not just Gods. Forgiveness is our routine. We have no humans like Eliot Spitzer. We pardoned all bankers committed crimes under the scheme drafted by international lawyers, government, and those bankers with the blessing of our judges, our parliament members, and our dearly friend IMF.

At least 80 banks were closed down in the midst of 1997-1999 financial collapses. Some bankers were forced to surrender their assets in exchange of no criminal charges, but others managed to escape. Indonesian people bear the burden of around US$60 billion, almost the same amount with total foreign loans disbursed to the country for few decades.

The leaders promised that such settlement will be the last and will not happen again. But only months after the massive banks closure, in 2000 another two big banks were in trouble. One, BII has to be injected with Rp14 trillions of government bond, while the other Unibank was closed down with Rp3 trillion lost for the state and nobody has been asked for responsibility for the burden.

Shortly after the closure of the bank, both Central Bank (BI) and Security Exchange Commission (Bapepam) announced that Unibank violated banking law and capital market law. Both institutions also identified the violations were criminal acts. But four years since then, we have not found any criminal from the bank.

And now, we have the Bank Global. The bank is almost the same like Unibank in the sense that both laws (banking and capital market laws) were violated. Main suspects are already identified. But please don’t expect too much. Without persistence coverage from the media, we could only imagine that we might end up with another forgiveness and no criminals to be put in jail.

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