Indonesian woman gets five years for bribing top prosecutor

Jul 29, 2008, 5:45 GMT

Jakarta - Indonesia's anti-graft court handed down a five-year prison sentence Tuesday to a businesswoman charged with paying a 660,000-dollar bribe to a former top prosecutor to drop a major embezzlement case.

A panel of judges at the anti-corruption court in Jakarta found Artalyta Suryani 'convincingly and legally guilty' of a criminal act of corruption for paying a bribe to a senior prosecutor at Indonesia's attorney general's office.

In addition to five years in prison, Suryani was also ordered to pay a 250-million-rupiah (27,100-dollar) fine, Chief Judge Mansyurdin Chaniago said, reading the court's ruling.

Suryani was charged under anti-corruption laws with paying the bribe to Urip Tri Gunawan to drop a probe into Syamsul Nursalim, one of Indonesia's richest men, who is accused of embezzling 3 billion dollars in emergency bail-out loans to his bank during the Asian financial crisis in 1998.

Gunawan, who is also being tried separately on charges of accepting bribes, had led the investigation into alleged misuse of the Bank Indonesia's liquidity fund by a bank formerly owned by Nursalim.

If found guilty of corruption, Gunawan could face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Gunawan is one of several prosecutors whose secretly taped conversations about the investigation have been played during the trial of Suryani.

Officials from the Corruption Eradication Commission said they caught Gunawan carrying a large amount of cash after a meeting with Suryani, a friend of the Nursalim family, in March - one week after he had called off the investigation.

Both Suryani and Gunawan have denied the bribery charges, claiming the money was linked with another business.

Suryani told the court that she was still considering whether she would file an appeal to a higher court in order to overturn the verdict.

During current President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's administration several high-ranking officials, ranging from a former religious affairs minister to a former governor of Aceh province, have been jailed, although critics say that some of the worst cases of graft have yet to be tackled.