JAKARTA — Prominent Indonesian environmental forensic expert Bambang Hero Saharjo faces yet another potential lawsuit for serving as a state witness against alleged violators, this time in a high-profile tin laundering case. Lawyer Andi Kusuma filed a police report against Bambang on Jan. 8, alleging the veteran forestry professor lacked the competence to assess the total environmental damages incurred in the case — a convoluted corruption scheme involving illegal mining in the tin hub of the Bangka-Belitung Islands. Several people have been charged in the case, many of them already convicted and sentenced. Bambang, as a witness for the prosecution, testified in court that the illegal mining component of the scheme alone resulted in total environmental damages of 271 trillion rupiah, or about $16.6 billion. The corruption component amounted to nearly 30 trillion rupiah ($1.8 billion) in losses to the state, according to prosecutors. Andi, who doesn’t represent anyone charged in the case but claims to represent the wider community of Bangka-Belitung, alleged in his police report that Bambang’s assessment had cast the local tin mining industry in a bad light. Bambang, he said, was no financial expert, and the figure that he came up with made it seem “as if an extraordinary crime has occurred in Bangka-Belitung.” Bambang, who has successfully fended off two previous lawsuits brought by palm oil companies hit with record fines for forest fires as a result of his assessments in those cases, said this latest threat gave credence to his jihad, or struggle, in…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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