MALINDA "INONG" DEE

A girl has to get by.

Twin Nightmares for Citibank Indonesia

Written by Our Correspondent   

Saturday, 02 April 2011

Sexy Swindler and Debt-Collection Murder Arrests Give Citi Sleepless Week in Jakarta

In Jakarta, Citibank’s public relations staff must have put the banking giant‘s corporate slogan – “Citi never sleeps” – to good use over the past week as twin scandals involving an alleged beating death and a sexy swindler rocked the company.

First, a “relationship manager” employed by the bank for the last 15 years, variously known as Malinda Dee, Melinda Dee, Inong Malinda or just MD, was nabbed on March 25 after allegations came to light that she used her connections with her customers to steal about $2 million.

Pictures of the middle-aged woman, with long-hair, ample curves and heavy makeup, soon seemed to be everywhere, showing her in come-hither poses and skin tight skirts with a stable of luxury cars and an arm-candy husband, a minor 22-year old TV actor named Andhika Gumilang.

But Dee’s alleged over-the-top stealing is one thing, leaving a customer dead inside a branch office after a run-in with debt collectors is quite something else.

On Tuesday, Irzen Okta, 50, the secretary general of a minor political party, the National Unifying Party (PPB), went into a private room at a Citibank office on a crowded main street in Jakarta and never came out alive.

Police said the room where Irzen met with two contract debt collectors and a Citibank employee to discuss his credit card debt ‑ the bank said he owed, with interest, more than $10,000; the victim put the figure at about $7,000 – was splattered with blood but it was unclear if the brain hemorrhage that took his life was the result of a beating or just fear, stress and intimidation.

“The autopsy results so far have not shown any sign of beating with a blunt object,” a senior police officer told the media on Friday. “The cause of death, according to the autopsy, was a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.”

The police have arrested the two debt collectors and a Citi employee as suspects in the case and they are trying to figure out how Irzen’s blood ended up on the walls and curtains of the conference room.

The incident highlights the tough tactics of debt collectors in Indonesia. Credit firms, banks and others routinely hire thugs to go after deadbeats, leaving many people frightened of facing the agents if they get behind in their bills. Reacting to Irzen’s demise, lawmaker Harry Azhar Azis, urged Bank Indonesia (BI) to issue regulations to reign in violent debt collectors.

On Friday, the central bank summoned Citibank and other banks and told them to go easy on roughing up their customers, but a BI official told reporters there were no regulations that could compel banks to restrain their attack dogs.

The official, Muliaman Hadad, warned banks that they could be subject to “reputation and operational risks” from heavy-handed debt collectors, according to the Jakarta Post.

While the dead politician may not have been worked over with brass knuckles, police said the three debt collectors he faced were both rough and intimidating. After Irzen arrived at the bank asking to discuss his debt, he was taken to a small room where the suspects “pounded on the table, kicked a chair and tapped on the victim’s shoulders,” a police officer said, according to the Jakarta Globe. In another account, in the Jakarta Post, police said the victim was beaten and humiliated.

Most accounts agree that Irzen complained of a severe headache and was then further ridiculed, eventually falling to the floor, foaming at the mouth. One of the debt collectors, Aries Lukman, laughed at the man’s suffering, police said.

He died a short time later.

The politician’s death competed for headlines during the week with Dee’s antics. Her husband, who is a hunky pitchman for cigarettes of no particular renown before his wife’s alleged theft came to light, denied being aware of any misdeeds as he made the rounds of local gossip TV shows. Police seized from Dee two luxury apartments, two Ferraris, a Mercedes Benz and a Hummer in the course of investigations that began after some of Dee’s Citi clients complained that their savings had disappeared into her designer purse.

Given the woman’s looks, age and taste for the good life, Dee, who is variously reported to be 45 and 50, set off a storm of tabloid titillation, with many even respectable news outlets speculating on whether some of the ill-gotten wealth might not also have been spent on augmenting her impressive upper silhouette. On Friday, the National Police headquarters looked like a luxury car showroom as her fleet of flashy rides was on display in the parking lot.

Beleaguered Citibank officials said as little as they could about their twin PR nightmares during the week. “It is our commitment to protect the interest of our customers, including swiftly repaying all customers who suffered losses in the fraudulent transaction, fairly and timely,” said Citi’s Indonesia country corporate affairs head, Ditta Amahorseya, in a statement in response to Dee’s embezzlement.

After the bank’s contract employees were arrested on suspicion of murder in the Irzen case Thursday, Ditta issued a statement saying the bank had a strict code of conduct with regards to debt collection. “As representatives of the bank, all our contract staff are required to adhere to [the code] during all interactions with customers,” she said.

“We are cooperating fully with the police in their investigations to determine if agency staff adhered to the code of conduct.”

In happier days for Malinda Dee, far right

Who Got Swindled at Citibank Indonesia?

Written by Our Correspondent   

Friday, 08 April 2011

Police generals suspected of keeping their loose change in Citigold accounts, as the mess for the bank gets worse by the day

The big question that Jakarta authorities appear to be dancing delicately around in the US$2.3 million Citibank fraud scandal that that has transfixed Indonesia over the past couple of weeks is who got defrauded.

National Police officers investigating Inong Malinda Dee, a curvaceous 47-year-old senior Citibank relationship manager who is accused of misappropriating her clients' money, have yet to offer any clue as to who among Dee's list of some 500 premium "Citigold" customers was defrauded.

There are growing suspicions in Jakarta that some of the swindled customers don't want their names made public because they might have to explain how they came by enough money to avail of ultra-premium private banking services normally reserved for the very wealthy.

"This is the parlor game of the moment," a Jakarta source told Asia Sentinel. "Trying to figure out who fell under the sway of the Dee."

"No one wants to admit to this," said an aide to Vice President Boediono. One senior politician just laughed. "This is all anyone is talking about," he said. "I doubt anyone will admit to losing money."

Only three victims have filed complaints with police, but even their names are not known. Dee's personal wealth, including premium luxury cars and a wide range of properties, might also give substance to allegations that she borrowed a lot more than the US$2 million from her customers' accounts.

One name that has surfaced is that of the head of internal affairs for the National Police, Inspector General Budi Gunawan, who denied he was one of her victims after being named in a Koran Tempo daily newspaper article as having filed a complaint with the police.

Intriguingly, Gunawan's name also surfaced in a Tempo Magazine article last June that listed a variety of police officials with wads of unexplained wealth. Gunawan was listed as the third richest among the bunch, with Rp4.68 billion (US$518,732.3967) in accounts as of Aug. 19, 2008. He was alleged to have opened another account with his son and deposited Rp29 billion and Rp25 billion respectively although the bank wasn't named. At the time, Gunawan indignantly said, "The report is completely not true."


 

These days its a head scarf and too many questions

National Police earlier this week officially denied that Gunawan or any other police officer had any money in Dee's keeping. "I can assure you that none of the victims is a police general. It's just a rumor, which I don't know came from where," the head of the National Police's special crimes unit, Brig. Gen. Arief Sulistyo, told reporters Wednesday.

The widespread supposition in Jakarta is that Gunawan, who was once very close to former President Megawati Sukarnoputri of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle as her police aide, isn't the only official believed to have money stashed away in the Citi accounts.

The year-old Tempo story, using information from the respected Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), cited a raft of top police officials as having unexplained wealth. They included, in addition to Gunawan, Mathius Salempang, the East Kalimantan Provincial Police Chief; Sylvanus Yulian Wenas, chief of the Mobile Brigade Special Unit; Badrodin Haiti, Head of the Police Law Development Division; Susno Duadji, ex-Chief of the Investigation and Crime Unit, and Bambang Suparno, a lecturer at the Police Academy. All denied the Tempo story. Unknown persons who were believed to represent police officials attempted to buy up the entire monthly edition of the magazine, only to have editors order 30,000 reprints.

Of the batch named by Tempo, only the colorful Susno, once a candidate for National Police chief, came forward to say that a number of police officers had acquired wealth through soliciting bribes and other means. His attempt at whistle blowing was met by a prosecution for corruption. He was convicted on March 24 and sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison. The sentence is being appealed.

"I wasn't surprised that there were attempts to retaliate against what I'm doing," Susno told the Jakarta Globe in an interview after his conviction. He said he was "framed" because he tried to clean up the police force.

"If it was police generals that Dee swindled this will all get very uncomfortable," a source in Jakarta told Asia Sentinel.

The three victims who have lodged complaints against Citi were all businessman, a police source told the Jakarta Globe: "One of them is Madurese. He is so rich he did not realize his money had been stolen by the suspect."

As a result of the scandal, Citibank has been suspended from recruiting new Citigold customers and become an object of widespread derision.

On Thursday, the bank was also told it could no longer issue credit cards in Indonesia because of an unrelated mess, the death of a customer inside a Citibank branch as he was undergoing a harsh grilling from the bank's debt collectors. That tragedy occurred on March 29, just five days after Dee was arrested.

Central bank governor Darmin Nasution told a House of Representatives commission Wednesday that the US bank had failed to implement a proper internal control system. The central bank said it summoned Citibank's country chief officer and related officials and imposed remedial steps.

The bank has apologized both for Dee's shenanigans and the death of its customer, a minor politician named Irzen Okta.

The two cases have become a political football in the House, with politicians playing the nationalist card to fulminate against international financial institutions, accusing Citibank of failing to protect its customers, an irony in a country which has seen a long trail of banks disappear because of fraud and mismanagement. After the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-1998, domestic bankers stole more than US$13.5 billion from the Indonesian central bank's recapitalization lifeline to 48 ailing banks. Most of the money is believed to have been deposited in Singaporean banks, a haven for hot money from around the region.

Dee has been characterized in the country's press as a bombshell and former model who built up her considerable décolletage through plastic surgery and has a 22-year-old husband. She has been photographed demurely in a headscarf while in police custody recently and has volunteered through her lawyer, Halapancas Simanjutak, to give back any money that might accidentally have stuck to her fingers.

The money appears to have been enough to buy two luxury apartments, two Ferraris, a Mercedes-Benz and a Hummer and to take care of the boy-toy husband, who has been on a series of local television talk shows to deny any knowledge of misdeeds.

Citibank, facing a public relations nightmare, has said it is committed to recovering the money lost by its Citigold customers, while at the same time saying it does not order its debt collectors to throttle dead-beat clients. Two Citi employees and two contract debt collectors have been named suspects so far in the death of Irzen, who owed the bank some US$10,000 and whose widow has come forward to say the couple was harassed last year by debt collectors at their home.

"It is our commitment to protect the interest of our customers, including swiftly repaying all customers who suffered losses in the fraudulent transaction, fairly and timely," said Citi's Indonesia country corporate affairs head, Ditta Amahorseya, in a statement in response to Dee's embezzlement.

After the bank's contract employees were arrested in the Irzen case, Ditta issued a second statement saying the bank had a strict code of conduct with regards to debt collection. "As representatives of the bank, all our contract staff are required to adhere to [the code] during all interactions with customers," she said.