Former Indonesian communications ministry officials jailed in data centre graft case

JAKARTA – The Jakarta Corruption Court found two former senior officials at the then Communications and Information Ministry guilty in a corruption case related to procurement in the temporary national data centre (PDNS) project.

Former director-general of informatics applications Semuel Abrijani Pangerapan was sentenced to six years in prison, while former informatics application services director Bambang Dwi Anggono was sentenced to nine years in prison, Kompas.id reported.

Aside from the prison terms, the court also fined Semuel and Bambang 500 million rupiah (S$38,000) each, or an additional 140 days in jail.

The bench also ordered Semuel and Bambang to pay 6.5 billion rupiah and 1.5 billion rupiah in restitution, respectively.

The verdict, read out by a panel of judges presided over by Judge Lucy Ermawati on March 10, was lighter than the prosecutor’s demand of 10 years for Semuel and seven years for Bambang.

Other defendants in this case were former Communications and Information Ministry employee Nova Zanda, who acted as a procurement officer in the project, former tech company Aplikanusa Lintasarta general manager Alfie Asman and former Docotel Tekonologi account manager Pini Panggar Agusti.

Nova received a five-year prison sentence, while judges handed six-year prison sentences to Alfie and Pini.

The judges also confirmed an estimated state loss incurred by the corruption case amounting to 140.8 billion rupiah.

“(The number) was according to an audit report by the Development Finance Comptroller (BPKP),” said Judge Daru Swastika Rini during the March 10 hearing, as quoted by Antara.

All defendants and the prosecutors told the courtroom that they would think about whether to appeal the verdict.

The Central Jakarta Prosecutor’s Office launched the investigation in March 2025, several months after a ransomware attack against the temporary data centres.

In June 2024, the sites used to store data from more than 400 government agencies were subject to a cyberattack using Brain Cipher, an update of the LockBit 3.0 ransomware, resulting in the disruption of public services such as immigration.

The attack prompted prosecutors to look further into the facilities and their procurement process.

In the verdict, judges found that the tender process for the project, which took place between 2020 and 2024, was rigged to benefit Lintasarta, a subsidiary of publicly listed telecommunications giant Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison group.

The officials removed some requirements from the tender for Lintasarta to win, which did not fulfil the international safety standard initially required.

Collusion between Semuel, Bambang and Nova allowed Lintasarta to win multiple contracts for the temporary data centres from 2020 to 2022, from which the company illicitly enriched around 140.8 billion rupiah.

The judges also found that Lintasarta had to pay kickbacks for Semuel and Bambang after the officials in 2020 threatened that the firm would lose the data centre contract in 2021, despite the company having invested 40 billion rupiah worth of hardware and software for the projects.

“If Lintasarta wanted to win the project for 2021, defendant Alfie Asman had to give 3 billion rupiah for Bambang... and Semuel,” the judge read the verdict.

With a price tag of around 958 billion rupiah, the PDNS were installed in 2020 to serve as temporary facilities while the government constructed a permanent one in Bekasi, West Java.

The temporary facilities were developed by former communications minister Johnny G. Plate, who was convicted in 2023 in a corruption case pertaining to inflated procurement contracts for a government 4G telephony project. THE JAKARTA POST/ASIA NEWS NETWORK