Crazy Rich Surabaya Budi Said Becomes A Engineering Suspect For Selling And Buying Antam Gold

JAKARTA - Investigators at the Deputy Attorney General for Special Crimes at the Attorney General's Office (Jampidsus Kejagung) have named the "Crazy Rich" Surabaya Budi Said (BS) as a suspect in the illegal transaction case of conspiracy to engineer ANTAM's gold sale and purchase transactions.

The businessman who lives in Surabaya was named a suspect after undergoing an examination at the Jakarta Round Building (Jampidsus), Thursday, then was immediately detained at the Salemba Rutan at the Attorney General's Office in order to speed up the investigation.

"Based on the results of the intensive examination, today we raise the status of the person concerned as a suspect," said the Director of Investigation (Dirdik) of the Jampidsus Attorney General's Office, Kuntadi, as reported by ANTARA, Thursday, January 18.

Kuntadi explained that this case began around March to November 2018, the suspect Budi Sai together with a number of individuals with the initials EA, AP, EKA and MD had made malicious conspiracy, engineering gold buying and selling transactions.

"Some of the names were employees of PT ANTAM," said Kuntadi.

As for the engineering of the sale and purchase of gold carried out by the suspect and several elements, Kuntadi continued, by setting the selling price below the price set by PT ANTAM, on the pretext that there was a discount from PT ANTAM.

"Even though at that time PT ANTAM did not do that (discount)," said Kuntadi.

Then, to cover up the illegal transactions, the suspect and the elements used a transaction pattern outside the mechanism set by PT ANTAM.

Therefore, said Kuntadi, PT ANTAM could not control the amount of precious metal and the amount of money was transacted which resulted in a huge difference between the amount of money given by the suspect and the precious metal that was handed over.

"As a result of the difference to cover it up, the perpetrators then made a letter that was allegedly fake, which in essence seemed as if the transaction had been carried out and that it was true that PT ANTAM had a shortage in handing over precious metals," said Kuntadi.

With the existence of malicious reform by the suspect and the elements, PT ANTAM suffered a loss of 1.136 tons of precious metal or around Rp. 1.1 trillion.

"As for the articles that were violated, it is suspected that Article 2 paragraph (1), and Article 3 in conjunction with Article 18 of the Tipidkor Law in conjunction with Article 55 paragraph (1) to 1 of the Criminal Code," said Kuntadi.

Head of the Legal Information Center (Kapuspenkum) of the Attorney General's Office, Ketut Sumedana, said this case was a new case handled by the Attorney General's Office of Jampidsus since December 2023.

"So this is a new case based on our findings, there has not been a special investigation for a month and we immediately named a suspect," said Ketut.