Orders The Attorney General's Office To Completely Investigate The Cooking Oil Mafia, Jokowi: To Know Who's Playing

Photo: BPMI Setpres

JAKARTA - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has asked the Attorney General's Office to thoroughly investigate who is behind the expensive and scarce cooking oil in the country.

He conveyed this in response to the appointment of four suspects in the alleged cooking oil mafia by the Attorney General's Office on Tuesday, April 19 yesterday. One of the parties named as suspects is the Director General (Dirjen) of Foreign Trade (Daglu) of the Ministry of Trade with the initials IWW.

"Yesterday the Attorney General's Office has named four suspects in the cooking oil business and I ask that they be thoroughly investigated so that we can know who is playing, and we can understand," said Jokowi in his statement at the Bangkal Market, Sumenep Regency, Madura, East Java, which was broadcast on the Secretariat's YouTube channel. President, Wednesday, April 20.

Furthermore, Jokowi said that the process of regulating cooking oil prices in the community is currently not running optimally. A number of regulations, including the determination of the Highest Retail Price (HET) for bulk cooking oil have also not been implemented in the market.

So, he suspected that there had been a game that caused the price of cooking oil to be high.

"The determination of the HET for bulk oil and then subsidies to these producers, we have seen that it has been running for the past few weeks has not been effective. In the market, I see that a lot of bulk oil is not in accordance with the HET that we have set. This means that there is indeed a game," said the former Governor of DKI that Jakarta.

As previously reported, the Attorney General's Office has not only named IWW as a suspect. There were three people from the private sector who were also involved, namely the Senior Manager of Corporate Affairs of the Permata Hijau Group with the initials SMA; Commissioner of PT Wilmar Nabati Indonesia with the initials MPT; and the General Manager of PT Musim Mas with the initials PT.

The Attorney General's Office said that three suspects from the company had intensively tried to approach the Director General of Trade at the Ministry of Trade IWW to obtain a CPO export permit. In fact, the three are not companies that are entitled to export approval.

As a result of their actions, the suspects have caused losses to the country's economy. In addition, they also make cooking oil expensive and scarce in the country.