Aulia Masna on Nostr: You wanna hear an insane story of what happened in Jakarta this week? I'm not ...

You wanna hear an insane story of what happened in Jakarta this week? I'm not exaggerating for effect. If you tried to pitch Wednesday's standoff to a movie studio exec as a script, they'd bounce it for being too contrived, too many entanglements, too much lazy plotting, probably too absurd and difficult to follow. Except this one's real, and mind you this is still ongoing.

It starts with the national police storming a high end cafe in broad daylight in South Jakarta. Behind a wall display, they pry open a two meter steel vault nobody outside was supposed to know existed.

Crack it open and out comes SGD 3.13 million, just under US$890,000 in cash, and a stack of rupiah, adding up to nearly Rp 60 billion or roughly USD 3.3 million from that one hiding spot. A money changer next door coughs up another Rp 7.2 billion (~USD 400k) in foreign currency on top of that.

Officially, this is just a routine probe into a coal graft scandal, a scheme worth an estimated Rp 5 trillion where officials allegedly rigged coal deliveries to state power plants, the same mess blamed for the blackouts that knocked out power across Sumatra back in May.

Nobody's really buying "routine," though. The cafe is reportedly tied to the inner circle of the Deputy Attorney General for Special Crimes, the office that's been leading the graft cases against dirty cops, against Nadiem Makarim, against a string of Jokowi-era officials.

The police, who built serious muscle under former President Jokowi and are still seen as loyal to his old power base, chose that exact address to raid. Reads a lot less like coincidence than like a message.

Did the AGO do anything about it? You bet. That same night, soldiers turned up to guard the Deputy AG's private residence, officially framed as routine protection detail under a presidential regulation, though the timing makes that explanation feel awfully convenient.

By dawn Thursday, dozens of TNI personnel had also shown up at Jakarta Police headquarters. Separately, investigators searched a luxury house out in Sentul, Bogor, and found another hidden safe: 74 kilograms of gold bars plus US$4.77 million, SGD 14 million and change, and a stack of rupiah, worth roughly Rp 476 billion all told.

There's word that a photo of the Deputy AG himself was found at that house, though police say that's still under investigation, not confirmed.

Why would the cops take a swing this risky? Look at the last few months. Prabowo has been quietly distancing himself from Jokowi, and the Attorney General's Office has been on a run, arresting officials tied to the old guard, including police officials caught up in separate graft cases.

It's also the AGO's prosecutors who landed the biggest headline conviction of the year, the one that sent Nadiem Makarim away for more than 15 years over the Chromebook procurement scandal, a verdict that rattled the entire tech and creative sector. With the walls closing in, the police apparently decided to hit back at the one prosecutor holding the most leverage over them.

It's wild to watch this whole thing playing out. Cops raiding prosecutors, soldiers guarding the prosecutors from the cops, hidden vaults stuffed with gold and foreign cash, all of it functioning as a quiet proxy war between a former president trying to hold onto his legacy and a new one cutting the strings one by one. Meanwhile, most people online are just grabbing their snacks and popcorn, because nobody's shocked anymore. As far as the public's concerned, whoever gets exposed in this political war doesn't really matter. They're all crooks anyway.

Here’s a news report about it https://jakartaglobe.id/news/hidden-safe-reveals-rp-67-billion-cash-74-kg-gold-in-coal-graft-investigation