Young officials stash billions of rupiah in their bank accounts

Young officials stash billions of rupiah in their bank
accounts

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta | Wed, 12/07/2011 8:22 AM

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The nation’s money laundering watchdog has revealed that dozens of civil servants — still in their 20s or 30s — are thought to have committed graft and stashed their illegal gains in separate bank accounts owned by family members.

The Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK) deputy chief, Agus Santoso, said on Tuesday that the institution had recently submitted a report to law enforcers regarding the suspiciously large bank accounts belonging to dozens of young and low-ranking civil servants: namely, those holding ranks of IIIA and IIIB, and still aged between 28 and 38.

Agus, who was recently installed as the PPATK deputy chief in October, said he was flabbergasted to discover during the first month in his new job so many low-ranking civil servants possessing such moneyed bank accounts.

“You would be shocked if you knew the value [of their bank accounts], as they range from millions to hundreds of billions of rupiah,” he said. “Their bank accounts had been distributed to their wives, children, even parents-in-law.”

Agus argued that such deeds could potentially deliver a blowback for the civil servants’ families as, according to the 2010 Money Laundering Law, everybody involved in stashing the money would face charges.

He admitted, however, that his institution could not prosecute the civil servants, as the PPATK was merely a “financial intelligence unit”, and it could only go so far as to submit the report to the relevant law enforcement institutions, such as the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the Attorney General’s Office (AGO), and the National Police.

According to Agus, since 2002 the PPATK has submitted 1,200 reports concerning suspiciously large bank accounts belonging to civil servants to the KPK, the AGO and the police, but the response from those institutions has so far been unsatisfactory.

“For example, there was a case involving a civil servant that we reported in 2008; since that time, his [the civil servant’s] career has soared,” Agus said.

Former PPATK chief and member of the National Commission for Good Governance, Yunus Husein, told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday that the prevalent corruption within government institutions was caused by the country’s flawed budgetary system, adding that the current system still had huge loopholes, which lent themselves to fraudulent practices.

“For example, the [end of the budgeting period] in the state budget last year was set for Dec. 15. If there was still money remaining at that date, it had to be returned to the state,” he said.

“Meanwhile, projects were still up and running; so, instead of returning the money to the state, [the civil servants] chose to keep the money in their own bank accounts.”

The PPATK’s findings were another major blow for the bureaucratic reform program implemented in many government institutions, whose officers and bureaucrats had seen significant payrises in the program’s so-called remuneration policy.

Yenti Garnasih, a criminal law and money laundering expert at Trisakti University, said it was imperative for the allegedly corrupt civil servants to be charged under the money laundering law, arguing that while the anticorruption law exerted punishment upon corruptors, the money laundering law had the additional “strategic power” to retrieve the stolen state funds. (sat)

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Menjadi Presiden AS Bikin Panjang Umur

KALAU dilihat dari foto-foto presiden Amerika
Serikat, dari sebelum sampai sesudah ia memegang jabatan, tampak ada
penambahan keriput dan rambut yang beruban dari sebelumnya. Menurut
penelitian dari ahli demografi dari Universitas Illinois Chicago, S.
Jay Olshansky, yang dimuat dalam jurnal Asosiasi Kesehatan Amerika,
presiden AS mengalami penuaan lebih cepat, namun memiliki harapan
hidup lebih lama daripada manusia pada umumnya.

Olshansky
tertarik meneliti ini ketika Presiden Barack Obama merayakan ulang
tahun ke-50 di kampung halamannya, Chicago. Saat itu media menyiarkan
potret gambar-gambar sebelum menjabat hingga kini menjadi presiden AS
ke-44 itu. Ketika gambar difokuskan ke rambut dan mata, tampak rambut
Obama mulai beruban dan mata semakin keriput.

Olshanksy mulai
menghitung dari usia dan tahun saat mereka mulai dilantik sebagai
presiden AS. Lalu membandingkannya dengan berapa lama mereka
benar-benar hidup. Empat presiden yang meninggal karena terbunuh tidak
masuk dalam penelitiannya. Ia menemukan bahwa 23 dari 34 presiden AS
meninggal karena faktor alami pada usia yang sangat senja. Mereka
hidup lebih lama dari pria-pria yang hidup di
masanya.

Contohnya, usia rata-rata dari delapan presiden
pertama hingga 79,8 tahun. Padahal, harapan hidup pria pada masa itu
adalah kurang dari 40 tahun. Alasannya mungkin mereka memiliki tingkat
pendidikan yang lebih tinggi dan akses kesehatan yang lebih baik dari
orang lain. "Semua presiden selalu memanfaatkan kekayaannya untuk
menjaga kesehatan, mereka memiliki akses ke perawatan medis yang
berkualitas," kata Olshansky yang mencatat bahwa tidak ada cara ilmiah
yang langsung mengukur tingkat penuaan biologis.

Usia rata-rata
presiden saat dilantik dalam penelitian ini adalah 55,1 tahun, yang
berarti mereka berhasil menghindari berbagai macam penyakit serius di
saat pria di usia yang sama mengalami penyakit-penyakit serius.
Olshansky mengatakan stres memang dapat meningkatkan tanda-tanda
penuaan, tetapi belum tentu mempersingkat harapan hidup
presiden.

Dr. William Hall, seorang pakar penuaan di
Universitas Rochester Medical Center mengatakan, "Penelitian ini
merupakan cara yang sangat cerdas dalam mengungkapkan prinsip penting
dari apa yang kita sebut dengan penuaan sukses". (rtrs/**)

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Rusia Balik Kecam AS yang Kritik Pemilu Duma

Metrotvnews.com, Moskow: Komentar Menteri Luar Negeri AS Hillary Clinton mengenai pemilihan parlemen Rusia tidak bisa diterima. Hillary Selasa (6/12) pagi mengatakan pemilu anggota Duma Rusia yang diselenggarakan pada Minggu (4/12) 'tidak bebas dan adil'. 

Beberapa pejabat Gedung Putih lainnya juga mengatakan Washington prihatin serius terhadap pemilihan umum di Rusia. Kementerian Luar Negeri Rusia mengatakan, Rusia mengharapkan pihak AS untuk menahan diri dari pernyataan tidak ramah yang bertentangan dengan arah positif umum  hubungan bilateral. 

"Kami harus menyatakan dengan menyesal bahwa Washington masih lekat pada stereotipe dan label lama tanpa mencoba mencari tahu apa yang sebenarnya terjadi dalam pemilihan kami," kata kementerian Luar Negeri Rusia pada Selasa (6/12). 

"Warga Rusia membuat pilihan mereka dan mengambil bagian aktif dalam pemungutan suara. Hanya mereka yang memiliki hak untuk menentukan masa depan negara, terlepas dari opini bias seseorang dan penerimaan yang dipolitisasi," katanya. 

Kementerian juga mencatat bahwa sistem elektoral Amerika Serikat juga bisa dianggap bukan 'suatu teladan keterbukaan dan keadilan'. Presiden Rusia Dmitry Medvedev Selasa juga memangkas kritik Washington mengenai pemilihan Duma, mengatakan bahwa sistem politik adalah urusan internal Rusia. 

"Jika mereka mengamati pemilu dan menemukan pelanggaran, itu adalah satu hal. Tetapi, masalah sistem politik Rusia bukanlah urusan mereka," katanya. 

Partai Rusia Bersatu yang berkuasa telah memenangkan hampir separuh dari suara dalam pemilihan Duma. 

Medvedev telah memerintahkan Komisi Pemilihan Umum Pusat untuk menyelidiki dugaan pelanggaran pemungutan suara, sementara menekankan bahwa pemilu mematuhi hukum Rusia. (Ant/ICH) 

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Daybreak

Daybreak

The Jakarta Post | Tue, 12/06/2011 6:40 PM

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Amusement park workers take a nap inside a wooden oscillating cylinder for motorcycle daredevils in Yogyakarta’s North Town Square on Tuesday. (Antara/Noveradika)

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Growing Pains star Tracey Gold opens up about her eating disorder

In the 80’s into the 90’s Tracey Gold was part of a staple family on sitcom television – the Seavers on Growing Pains. Tonight (December 2), on Lifetime’s Starving Secrets she takes on a different role – reaching out to women who have problems with eating disorders,  something she is all too familiar with, having gone through it herself.

“I needed a change when I was called into the producer’s office on Growing Pains and told I needed to gain weight. When I got back from the Christmas break, I was basically sent home and Warner Bros. put me into a hospital in LA. I had done some treatment quietly, but I don’t think I took it that seriously.  I was doing it to keep everyone else happy.”

Being in the Hollywood spotlight, the pressures of looking good and losing weight is everywhere.  “It started innocently enough with a diet. I lost the weight in a very short amount of time. Everyone was complimenting me, saying how great I looked. It really messed with my head. I really started to doubt how I looked before. Did I look like crap before?”

Gold’s lowest weight was 79 lbs, and now she is offering her experience to other women in her new show Starving Secrets which follows 10 women in crisis asking for help. Tracey takes them under her wing, mentors and offers them treatment through friendship and also in various hospitals across Southern California.

“After so many years of having so many people come up to me and ask for help, it’s always in this secrecy, and I just want to open it up a bit and make people understand what eating disorders are really about. They have many different faces than what you expect.”

Her advice for women going through this is to see an eating disorder specialist immediately.  Starving Secrets airs every Friday night, beginning tonight, on Lifetime.

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Open Source management gains traction in the Microsoft cloud

I know that people still look at you askance when you use the words “Microsoft” and “open source” in the same sentence, unless, of course, you are discussing litigation. But while Microsoft actually has a long history of both participating and litigating the open source community, they do actually have a few very active projects, primarily focused around issues with Hyper-V and virtualization, where they make a significant effort to get community involvement.

One of these significant efforts is the cloud management tool that was formerly a product known as the DotNetPanel, which was acquired by Microsoft and released into the open source community as the WebSitePanel project, a management component that integrates with the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit, which itself is a key component of the Hyper-V based cloud model.

One of the Microsoft Gold Partners that worked on the Dynamic Datacenter Toolkit development with Microsoft announced this weekend that they had integrated the WebsitePanel open source into their own Hyper-V hosted cloud. Managing and provisioning VMs is a task that is most often undertaken using dedicated, expensive proprietary software solutions, but virtualized hosting provider Applied Innovations has integrated WebsitePanel into their Virtualization environment. This allows their Hyper-V hosted clients to create and manage new VMs from directly within their management interface.

AI went with the open source WebsitePanel because they believed that they would get a heads-up on their competition by enabling this management capability for their Microsoft cloud by not waiting for third-party applications. They decided to integrate the open source project along with the work they were already doing to enable their cloud customers to create and manage new VMs. They were looking to deliver a unique and useful solution that provided a good value-add for their hosting services and well-served their customer needs.

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37 Saksi Diperiksa Terkait Runtuhnya Jembatan Kertanegara

Metrotvnews.com, Jakarta: Sebanyak 37 saksi diperiksa
terkait runtuhnya Jembatan Kartanegara di Tenggarong, Kabupaten Kutai
Kartanegara, Kalimantan Timur. "Sampai hari ini sudah diperiksa 37
orang sebagai saksi," kata Kepala Divisi Hubungan Masyarakat (Kadiv
Humas) Polri Inspektur Jenderal Polisi Saud Usman Nasution di Jakarta,
Selasa (6/12).

Saksi yang diperiksa di antaranya dua orang dari
PT. Bukaka, masing-masing manajer proyek di lapangan dan seorang
karyawan. PT. Bukaka adalah kontraktor yang melaksanakan pemeliharaan
terhadap jembatan Kartanegara.

"Belum ada tersangka, kita masih
menunggu analisis dari saksi ahli konstruksi, bagaimana kondisi
jembatan itu sejak dari awal pembangunan, pemeliharaan dan terakhir
sebelum ambruk," kata Saud.

Korban akibat tragedi ambruknya
Jembatan Kartanegara 21 orang. Jembatan Kartanegara yang diresmikan
pada 2001, di mana pembangunannya memakan waktu lima tahun pada masa
pemerintahan Bupati Kukar, Syaukani Hasan Rais.

Jembatan
Kartanegara yang membentang sepanjang 470 meter di atas sungai
Mahakam, menghubungkan Tenggarong Seberang dan Kota
Tenggarong.

Badan Reserse dan Kriminal (Bareskrim) Polri
mengirim tim terkait runtuhnya Jembatan Kartanegara. Namun sejauh ini
polisi belum tahu dugaan awal penyebab runtuhnya Jembatan Kartanegara,
karena ini akan diperiksa ahli konstruksi jembatan.(Ant/ICH)

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