Jakarta businesswoman jailed for graft

AN INDONESIAN businesswoman was jailed for five years yesterday after bribing a prosecutor for 660,000 US dollars ($ 902,219) to drop a major embezzlement case, following a trial that gripped the nation.

"Artalyta Suryani has been proven legally and convincingly to have engaged in a corruption crime and must be punished with five years imprisonment," the chief judge told the court.

The court heard she bribed senior prosecutor Urip Tri Gunawan to drop an embezzlement probe into her associate, banking tycoon Sjamsul Nursalim, one of Indonesia's richest men.

Nursalim, who is accused of embezzling three billion dollars in emergency bail-out loans to his bank during the Asian financial crisis in 1998, is on the run and believed to be in Singapore.

Secretly taped conversations between the businesswoman and the prosecutor were played during the trial, fanning headlines of widespread graft and influence peddling in the attorney general's office.

Several other top prosecutors implicated in the scandal were demoted but Attorney General Hendarman Supandji has refused to step down despite media calls for his resignation.

Gunawan was arrested in March as he left Nursalim's home in Jakarta with 660,000 dollars in cash, just days after the attorney general's office (AGO) dropped the 10-year investigation into the banker citing a lack of evidence.

Suryani argued that the money was a personal loan from her to help Gunawan start a car repair business.

The judge also ordered the businesswoman to pay a 250-million-rupiah (27,000-dollar) fine.

Despite Suryani's sentence, prosecutors would not automatically reopen the abandoned investigation into Nursalim.

AFP