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The Judicial Mafia Eradication Task Force on Friday gave an ultimatum to the Attorney General’s Office to wrap up its investigation into the protracted Rp 1.3 trillion ($141.7 million) tax evasion case involving palm oil giant PT Asian Agri.

The ultimatum was issued when the task force held a closed-door meeting with officials from the Attorney General’s Office (AGO), the National Police and the Finance Ministry’s directorate general of taxation to discuss the 2002-05 tax evasion case involving the company owned by the country’s seventh-richest man, Soekanto Tanoto.

The tycoon “prefers to spend his time outside Indonesia as a result of disagreements with the tax office,” according to Globe Asia magazine.

“It was agreed that in 14 days the tax investigators must complete all unfinished reports on the case,” Deputy Attorney General Darmono, who is also a task force member, told reporters following the meeting.

Darmono added that he would recommend that Attorney General Hendarman Supandji sanction prosecutors investigating the case if they fail to meet the deadline.

“If they can’t bring their reports in on time we will consider them incompetent in their prosecution of the case,” he said.

This is the second deadline given the AGO over the case. Following a meeting with the task force at the end of March, Darmono also said investigators were given 14 days to complete the case involving four key suspects.

The investigation into the case began in January 2007, and a total of 21 people have since been named as suspects by the AGO. However, only one Asian Agri official — the company’s former financial officer, Vincentius Amin Santoso — has been tried and jailed and that was in a separate case.

There has been limited or no progress in the tax fraud cases.

The tax office has twice submitted to prosecutors the results of its investigation into the other suspects, once in April last year and again in October, but the files were returned both times on the grounds that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

Darmono said three former and current Asian Agri officials are now being targeted, including Willihar Tamba, who was a director of PT Dasa Anugerah Sejati, a subsidiary of Asian Agri, in 2002-04, and Goh Bun Sen, who succeeded him in 2005.

Willihar and Goh were repeatedly rejected as suspects by the AGO under the recommendation of tax-office prosecutors who believed the two should be named witnesses instead of suspects.

Prosecutors have indicated they want to implicate Vincentius and Suwir Laut, who served as Asian Agri’s financial controller and tax manager, respectively, in the wake of the scandal.

The task force has visited Vincentius in the Cipinang penitentiary, where he is currently serving a sentence of 11 years and 1 month for defrauding Asian Agri out of $28 million.

During the visit, Vincentius was offered protection by the task force in exchange for providing information about the tax fraud allegations.

The company allegedly submitted inaccurate tax returns, and then moved the difference to affiliated companies in the British Virgin Islands, Macao, Mauritius and Hong Kong.