Attorney General Investigates Company’s Engineering Exports of CPO to Pome in Sumatra

Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —

The Attorney General’s Office (Kejagung) searched a number of locations related to the alleged corruption case of engineering the Crude Palm Oil (CPO) export code to become Palm Oil Mill Effluent (POME) in the 2022-2024 period.

Head of the Attorney General’s Legal Information Center, Anang Supriatna, said that searches were carried out on a number of companies that carried out the engineering.

“Investigators from the Attorney General’s Office carried out searches and are currently still ongoing in Sumatra, in several offices belonging to the PT mentioned yesterday,” he told reporters at the Attorney General’s Office, Thursday (12/2).

However, he did not reveal further details and what companies were being searched by investigators from the Deputy Attorney General for Special Crimes.

Anang only said that the searches were carried out in the Pekanbaru and Medan areas.

“Regarding the suspects and PT involved, we will just wait for the results,” he concluded.

This POME corruption case began when the government implemented a policy of limiting and controlling CPO exports in order to maintain the availability of cooking oil and price stability in the market.

However, investigators discovered that there was an act of engineering the classification of CPO export commodities using the export code POME or Palm Acid Oil (PAO) or residue from palm oil.

It was found that bribes were given and received with the aim of smoothing the administration and export control process.

Based on preliminary calculations, state financial losses due to the manipulation of the CPO export code to POME reached IDR 10.6 to IDR 14.3 trillion.

Currently, a total of 11 people have been named as suspects. Three of them are state administrators, namely FJR as the former Technical Director of Customs at the Directorate General of Customs and Excise (DJBC).

Then LHB as Head of Sub-Directorate for Non-Food Plantation Products Industry of the Ministry of Industry and MZ as Head of the Extension and Information Services Section of KPBC Pekanbaru.

(tfq/wis)

[Gambas:Video CNN]