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The General Elections Commission (KPU) has said it will not require legislative candidates to disclose the amount of donations they give to their respective parties.
KPU commissioner Sigit Pamungkas said on Friday it was not a problem for legislative candidates to fail to mention donations to political parties in the initial campaign fund reports submitted to the KPU by Dec. 27, last year.
“There’s no problem because it could be that they [the legislative candidates] have not done any activity [related to campaigning],” he told reporters at the KPU’s headquarters in Central Jakarta.
Sigit also reasoned that the responsibility of funding lay solely with the candidates themselves.
“Whether they want to report Rp 1 billion [US$82,000] or zero rupiah [in donations], that’s their responsibility,” he said.
According to Sigit, the KPU could only determine whether there were irregularities in legislative hopefuls’ donation reports after conducting an independent audit.
“The audit will be done once we receive the final campaign fund reports 15 days after voting day [on April 9],” he said.
Sigit was responding to a report from the People’s Voter Education Network (JPPR) that said as many as 1,170 from 6,607 legislative candidates failed to report the amount of their donations to their parties.
In the reports, the Great Indonesia Movement (Gerindra) Party reported the highest campaign funds with
Rp 144 billion. The party claimed the total campaign funds were collected from legislative candidates across Indonesia.
The JPPR, however, found that 148 legislative candidates from Gerindra, or 27 percent from a total of 557 candidates, failed to report their donations.
The People’s Conscience (Hanura) Party, which is backed by media tycoon Hary Tanoesoedibjo, who the party has nominated as its vice presidential candidate, submitted its initial campaign fund report of Rp 135.5 billion, higher than the ruling Democratic Party’s (PD) Rp 135 billion.
According to the JPPR’s report, the amount of donations from 64 of 558 Hanura candidates was not known.
Meanwhile, the largest opposition party, the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), reported initial campaign funds of Rp 130 billion, with 74 of 560 candidates failing to report their donations.
The party with the highest percentage of candidates with unknown donations, meanwhile, is the Prosperous Justice Party (PKS).
With Rp 32 billion in campaign funds, some 58 percent of the party’s candidates, or 283 out of 492 candidates, did not report their donations.
Out of 12 parties participating in the 2014 legislative election, only the National Democrat (NasDem) Party, with Rp 41 billion and 559 candidates, managed to include the donation details of all of its candidates.
Election Supervisory Committee (Bawaslu) commissioner Daniel Zuchron, meanwhile, said Bawaslu had also found irregularities in the campaign fund reports published by the KPU.
Daniel said that for now it was not a problem if legislative candidates had not put detail on their donations in campaign fund reports.
Political parties, however, shall already include details of all of their candidates’ donations when they submit reports again on how they have used or spent their campaign budgets on March 2, according to him. “There is no more tolerance in March since the March reports would be checked by auditors,” Daniel said.
Post: TheJakarta Post
Link: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/02/08/legislative-hopefuls-given-leeway-donation-reports.html
