•    HOME   
•    NEWS   
•    BUSINESS   
•    INTERNATIONAL   
•    TECH   
•    SPORTS   
•    LIFE & TIMES   
•    OPINION   
•    MY JAKARTA   
•    BLOGS   

Mochammad Tjiptardjo, the nation’s tax chief, revealed on Friday that Bakrie coal miner PT Bumi Resources and two of its units owed the government Rp 2 trillion ($212 million) in taxes.

Tjiptardjo said Bumi and PT Kaltim Prima Coal had been “under investigation” since March for possible tax evasion in 2007.

Meanwhile, the office had recently opened a probe of PT Arutmin Indonesia for similar irregularities, he said.
“We are working professionally here, separate from politics. I had started handling these taxpayers’ [cases] before the noise even started,” he said.

Tjiptardjo made the comments after the Wall Street Journal reported that Finance Minister Sri Mulyani Indrawati believed the Golkar Party, led by Aburizal Bakrie, was using the House of Representatives probe of Bank Century to discredit her. The taxation directorate is a part of the Finance Ministry.

When asked for comment, Lalu Mara Satria Wangsa, a spokesman for the Bakrie group, told the Jakarta Globe to contact the companies involved.

Dileep Srivastava, Bumi’s head of investor relations, also declined to speak on the matter.

Tjiptardjo said lawyers of two of the three miners had attempted to settle the issue by paying about Rp 1 trillion. He said the tax office had become suspicious earlier this year after realizing the companies had submitted incorrect tax declaration letters (SPT) for 2007.

But Tjiptardjo said the attempts to settle the case were not the proper way to get out of a government tax probe.

“The procedure is like this; they must pay their taxes and a 400 percent penalty, then they have to ask the finance minister to call off the investigation,” he said. “The point is that they have to admit their fault.”

With the penalty factored in, the three companies would have to pay as much as Rp 10 trillion.

Despite reported friction between Sri Mulyani and Bakrie group patriarch Aburizal, Tjiptardjo denied that the investigation was politically driven.

Yanuar Rizky, a market analyst and an anticorruption activist from Indonesia Corruption Watch, said on Friday that Sri Mulyani may be trying to shift the focus away from the Bank Century scandal to the Bakrie affiliates’ alleged tax troubles.

“If the Bakrie companies have violated tax regulations, then they should be brought to court,” he said. “But it’s not about public opinion wars. It should be about legal enforcement.”

Before being named head of the tax directorate, Tjiptardjo was its chief investigator and handled a number of cases involving large corporations under suspicion of evading taxes.

He also led the investigation of plantations company PT Asian Agri for allegedly evading Rp 1.3 trillion ($138 million) in taxes. The case is still outstanding.