The Government and Pertamina prepare Two Options to follow up Petral"s Audit

KATADATA - PT Pertamina (Persero) has given Pertamina Energy Trading Limited (Petral)’s audit forensic result to the government, which has prepared the next step to follow up the discovery in the audit result.

Rini Soemarno, State-owned Enterprises (SOE) Minister, said that there are two actions that would be taken by the government to follow up the discovery from the audit result. The first action will be done by Pertamina in a form of a internal corporate action. The second one is a legal action made by the government if there is any violations of law and state’s losses. 

“Pertamina has already conducted corporate action. The legal action can be done with Energy and Mineral Resources [EMR] Minister,” Rini said in SOE Ministry, Thursday (12/11).

Rini said that the talk about legal action towards Petral must wait for the return of EMR Minister, Sudirman Said, from Saudi Arabia. The result must also be discussed first with President Joko (Jokowi) Widodo before taking it into court. There is a high chance that a decision can be reached and the legal action can be taken by next week. 

Regarding the legal action, Coordinating Maritime and Resources Affairs Minister Rizal Ramli said that the government would process it in the domain of law. “Investigate it by the law, so that it will be clear who should be responsible,” Rizal said in BPPT Building, Jakarta, Thursday (12/11). 

On the other hand, internal corporate action has also been done to find out the things that have harmed Pertamina, like suspicious transactions and so on. “Like for example Petral’s personnel that are indicated in the audit, surely we will process it with the ways of the company,” Dwi Soetjipto, Pertamina’s president director, said.

Dwi also said that in the audit result, there was a third party in Petral that play its own business in procuring oil. This has made the cost of oil and fuel procurement for the domestic needs to be expensive. However, Dwi still would not mention the name of the culprit. The reason is because even the auditor still could not discover who is this “insider” that leaked information regarding the tender to other parties.

One of the problems that the auditor faces to reveal the “insider” is because Pertamina’s employees were not cooperative during the audit process. The indication during the audit process was found based on the e-mail track records, which leaked information about the tender, gas price, and oil import volume. 

Sudirman also confirmed about the third party involvement in the process of oil and fuel procurement. Because of that third party, Pertamina, Petral, and even people in general are being harmed because the price was messed up. Regarding the third party, Sudirman only said that it is not in Petral’s management or in Pertamina’s. “It’s not in the government too,” Sudirman added.