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

Her husband claims he doesn’t know where she is, antigraft investigators say they’re still searching and the immigration department says no Southeast Asian government has reported her presence in their country.

So then where is fugitive graft suspect Neneng Sri Wahyuni, the wife and alleged mastermind behind the equally notorious Muhammad Nazaruddin?

Nazaruddin on Friday denied knowing her whereabouts.

“I don’t know,” he said with a smile to reporters after a hearing for his graft trial at the Jakarta Anti-Corruption Court.

Last month he said that he frequently spoke to her on the phone while in police custody.

Neneng, who is wanted for alleged bid-rigging in a contract to supply solar power equipment for the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration, was last known to be in Colombia with her husband.

She is thought to have left shortly before the police arrested him there and sent him back to Indonesia.

“We’re still looking for her,” said Zulkarnain, deputy chairman of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).

Neneng is also the subject of an Interpol red notice arrest order, which seeks wanted persons with a view to extradition.

“To date there has been no information from anywhere in Asean [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] on her presence in the region,” said Bambang Irawan, director general of immigration at the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. He brought up Neneng’s case at a summit of Southeast Asian immigration departments last October.

Neneng was slapped with a travel ban on May 31 last year, but that was after she had fled Indonesia with her husband.

After Nazaruddin’s arrest, she was believed to have traveled to Malaysia, where the couple’s children were reportedly staying with other family members, though that was never confirmed.

Neneng is suspected of taking a Rp 2.7 billion ($302,000) cut of a Rp 8.9 billion project to supply solar equipment, in which she allegedly helped rig the bid to favor the eventual contract winner.

Oktarina Furi, her former assistant at the company that she and her husband ran, has painted her as the power behind the group’s finances and its host of shell companies. She said Neneng held the keys to all four cash-filled safes in the office, three of which were in her room.

“No one was allowed to take any money without Neneng’s permission, even if it was Nazaruddin,” Oktarina said last month when testifying in Nazaruddin’s trial. “She held full authority.”

Suara Pembaruan