Page 124 - SCANDAL AND DEMOCRACY

Baligate and All the Gates 109

firm Era Giat Prima (EGP) a whopping fee of nearly $80 million to facilitate payment
from BPPN of $120 million as compensation for defaulted loans.
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These negotiations were curious from the start since a blanket government guar-
antee already covered Bank Bali’s claims to BPPN’s rescue funds, obviating the need
for any third-party involvement. More surprising still was the size of the debt-
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collection fee, which amounted to 60 percent of the loans recovered. Pradjoto said
the amount sounded so “crazy” that at first he did not believe the transaction could
have happened. He discarded the documents left at his door, forcing the anonymous
whistle-blower to leave another copy a few days later.
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Media Coverage and Political Interests
Instead of downplaying the story, news outlets pounced on it, plunging headfi rst
into the factional warfare it brought to the surface. Almost immediately, observers
drew parallels with the United States’ Watergate scandal that brought down Richard
Nixon’s presidency. As with Watergate, the suspense that built with each new revela-
tion stemmed from the question, How high did responsibility reach? The scandal

quickly implicated increasingly prominent figures. Its rapid escalation, fed by leaks

and political infighting, would both reinvigorate the Jakarta media and eff ectively
check the reversal of the country’s democratization threatened by the corrupt bar-
gains and media reticence of the transition’s fi rst year.
After the initial burst of media coverage of Pradjoto’s revelation, Baligate expanded
as news outlets reported increasingly dramatic allegations. Among the most sensa-
tional came from a report that the head of EGP, the company that received the $80
million fee, was Golkar’s deputy treasurer, Setya Novanto. This revelation prompted
allegations that the money had ended up in the coffers of a special “Habibie Success
Team” created to assure the president’s victory in the 1999 elections.
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Further leaks sustained the scandal’s momentum, spurred in part by the release of
new information by sources. When mounting pressure prompted the police to name
nearly a dozen suspects, officials shared only the initials of those named, heightening
suspense by shifting focus to the media, who now scrambled to guess the full identi-
ties. On August 8, Golkar’s treasurer, Fadel Muhammad, told SCTV that “provi-
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sional evidence in the case showed suspect practices.” Then, on August 12, Marzuki
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Darusman, Golkar’s deputy chair, called a press conference at which he offered no
new information but directed the media to ignore red herrings and find the real per-
petrators. This seemingly deliberate blow to fellow Golkar members set off a new
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flurry of speculation.
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On August 15, the magazine Gamma published the transcript of a leaked phone
exchange between Novanto, a central figure in corruption scandals for years to come,
and the Golkar leader Arnold Baramuli, who coached Novanto on how to speak to
the media about the high fee EGP had charged Bank Bali. Unlike reaction to Panji
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Masyarakat ’s similar report in February of a phone exchange between President Habi-
bie and Attorney General Ghalib, the focus of both media and government remained
on the wiretap’s revelations rather than shifting to Gamma ’s ethics, reflecting support
for the public’s “right to know” guaranteed in the pending 1999 Press Law. The
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scandal widened further to implicate officials at BPPN, including the agency’s deputy
chair, Pande Lubis.
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At each stage, as headlines promised new revelations, editorials expressed out-
rage. “There is nothing more obscene than people stealing large sums of money from