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Golkar Party chairman Aburizal Bakrie said on Thursday that he would withdraw a defamation complaint against a top Democratic Party official after the latter apologized for linking him to a mining company at the center of a land dispute.

Aburizal said the police report against Ramadhan Pohan, the Democrats’ deputy secretary general, would be dropped because “there has been a public apology, even if it was given in a roundabout manner.”

The spat arose from remarks made by Ramadhan to the Jawa Pos News Network on Jan. 6, in which he linked Aburizal to Sumber Mineral Nusantara, the mining firm whose exploration activities in Bima, West Nusa Tenggara, sparked massive protests by locals and led to the torching of the district chief’s office.

“SMN serves as an ATM for Aburizal and his cronies, via the Bima district head,” he said. “Not for the Golkar Party, though, because not everyone in Golkar likes Aburizal.”

Aburizal said he had responded with the police report to teach Ramadhan a “political lesson” about slander.

“He can’t go around slandering others in politics,” he said. “But because he has apologized, albeit in a roundabout way, and it has been published in the newspapers, I believe I should accept his apology and retract the complaint.”

Previously, however, Ramadhan said he had offered a conditional apology to Aburizal — but not for the allegations.

“If he’s offended by my remarks, I apologize for that, but I’m not going to take back what I said,” he said on Tuesday.

Aburizal, who is also widely tipped to run for president in 2014, said he had taken a leaf out of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s book when he decided to file the report against Ramadhan, citing a case in which the president threatened to take legal action against a legislator for defamation.

“I did the same. But now that Ramadhan Pohan has apologized, the problem’s over and the people know that [his claims] are untrue,” Aburizal said.

When contacted for his response to the dropping of the complaint, Ramadhan said he was unaware of the move.

“I was under the impression that [Comr. Gen.] Sutarman said the case would proceed, in which case I’m ready for it,” he said, referring to the National Police’s chief of detectives.

One of Aburizal’s lawyers, Rudy Alfonso, previously said that SMN was in no way linked to Aburizal and indicated it was wholly owned by the Tahija family. That family, however, has denied the claim.