Communications and Information Minister Johnny G. Plate is arrested on corruption charges on May 17, 2023. - Antara/Jakarta Post-ANN
JAKARTA, May 23 (Bloomberg): Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Tuesday dismissed Johnny Plate as communication and information technology minister after he was detained in a probe into alleged corruption.
The government announced Plate’s dismissal on its website after earlier appointing an acting replacement for him.
Authorities detained Plate following investigations into alleged corruption in a 4G wireless base station project led by an agency under his ministry.
Jokowi is battling corruption and streamlining state spending in a bid to safeguard the public’s trust in his administration as his second term in office ends in 2024.
The Attorney General's Office (AGO) last week had named Communications and Information Minister Johnny G. Plate a suspect in the alleged botched procurement for a government 4G telephony project.
Johnny is from the NasDem Party, a member of the government coalition whose ministers are already subject to rumours of plans to oust them from the Cabinet in light of the party’s support for opposition figurehead Anies Baswedan’s presidential bid.
Johnny was immediately arrested on Wednesday following a three-hour interrogation by investigators from the office of the assistant attorney general for extraordinary crimes (Jampidsus) in Jakarta.
“We concluded that there is enough evidence that he [Johnny] was involved in the alleged corruption related to the [procurement of] BTS [base transceiver stations] for the 4G infrastructure project," Jampidsus director of investigation Kuntadi told the press last week.
The BTS procurement for the 4G telephony project is headed by the Telecommunications and Information Accessibility Agency (BAKTI), an agency under the auspices of Johnny’s ministry.
The project began in 2020 after he was installed as minister in October 2019. By 2023, the ministry was supposed to have erected some 8,000 4G BTS towers in the country’s underdeveloped and outermost regions.
But in the first development phase, which had a budget of Rp 10 trillion (US$672 million), the ministry only achieved half of its target of 4,200 BTS towers by 2021. The project’s major delays raised suspicions of graft.
Johnny was the sixth to be named a suspect after the AGO named five others in February.
