Jakarta. A bill submitted to parliament and aimed at defanging the national antigraft commission has served to highlight the growing rift between President Joko Widodo and his political backers.

Officials at the State Palace insisted on Thursday that the president had no plans whatsoever to revise the law on the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) by including it in this year’s docket of priority legislation, or Prolegnas.

“The government never proposed any amendments to the KPK law,” Andi Wdjajanto, the cabinet secretary, told reporters in Jakarta.

“There are 37 bills included in the 2015 Prolegnas, 10 of them submitted by the government. The KPK law isn’t among them.”

Pratikno, the state secretary, said separately that “the president has no intention of revising the KPK law” this year.

He also confirmed that Joko had summoned Justice Minister Yasonna Laoly to the State Palace on Wednesday over the minister’s decision to submit the bill to the House of Representatives, but declined to elaborate on the outcome of the meeting. The minister later denied having submitted the bill, claiming it was the House’s initiative to include it in the docket.

Yasonna, from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), which nominated Joko for president in last year’s election, previously said it was necessary to amend the existing law on the KPK to give the antigraft body’s activities a sound legal basis.

He said the most pressing matter was to define the extent of the KPK’s wiretapping powers – something that legislators have repeatedly tried to curtail in the past, to no avail. The KPK’s success rate in going after corruption suspects has been attributed in part to its ability to listen in on suspects’ phone calls without the need to obtain a warrant from Indonesia’s notoriously corrupt judiciary.

Yasonna also said there needed to be a “standardization” of the KPK’s prosecutorial powers with those of the Attorney General’s Office. The KPK is currently the only body apart from the AGO authorized to prosecute corruption cases, and boasts a near-100 percent conviction rate.

In a hearing with legislators on Thursday, antigraft commissioners called for the KPK law to be taken out of this year’s Prolegnas, arguing that several other related statutes, such as the Criminal Code and the law on money laundering, needed to be revised before any changes could be made to the KPK law.

Taufiequrachman Ruki, the interim KPK chairman, also urged that no attempt be made to weaken the commission, particularly with regard to its wiretapping powers.

“Our principle is that we don’t agree with any revision aimed at weakening the KPK. Whatever the proposed amendment, if its intention is to undermine the fight against corruption, we will reject it,” he told legislators.

Most corrupt party in the land

The controversy over the bill’s submission to the House has led to calls for Yasonna to be fired from the cabinet.

“He’s made frequent blunders in the campaign against corruption,” Donal Fariz, a researcher with Indonesia Corruption Watch, said at a public discussion on Wednesday.

The minister, whose party holds the dubious distinction of having the most members of any party prosecuted and jailed by the KPK, has appeared to take a much softer line on corruption than his predecessors.

In March, he drew widespread condemnation for arguing against restrictions on corruption convicts being awarded sentence cuts. The previous justice minister, Amir Syamsuddin, had instated tight controls on remissions for graft convicts, and a moratorium on granting them early release, but Yasonna said he would seek to roll these back.

Yasonna was also vocal in his support of Budi Gunawan being sworn in as the police chief, after the KPK had charged the three-star general with bribery and money laundering in January, in connection with millions of dollars’ worth of unexplained transactions passing through his personal bank accounts.

Joko eventually relented to the public outcry and dropped Budi as his candidate; the officer later won a dubious court ruling quashing the charges against him, and went on to be appointed the deputy to a police chief, Badrodin Haiti, who retires early next year.

Budi is a close associate of PDI-P chairwoman Megawati Soekarnoputri, having served as her security aide during her presidency, and his initial nomination was widely seen as a concession by Joko to his political patron.

The ideological differences between the president and his party have grown more apparent since the Budi fiasco, with PDI-P officials publicly branding Cabinet Secretary Andi, one of Joko’s closest aides, a traitor for steering him away from the party line. Earlier this month, Megawati’s son released a song with his rock band, titled “Traitor,” that party insiders say is aimed squarely at Andi and Rini Soemarno, the minister for state-owned enterprises who is also said to have the president’s ear and is shielding him from the PDI-P’s overbearing influence.

The party is also among the most vocal in calling for a cabinet reshuffle, with analysts saying it feels short-changed that it was given only four seats in the cabinet last October – no more than any of the other parties in Joko’s coalition.

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Source: The Jakarta Globe