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- 🛢️🧹 They Cleaned Up Oil Fields for Chevron, Then Got Slammed with a Corruption Conviction
🛢️🧹 They Cleaned Up Oil Fields for Chevron, Then Got Slammed with a Corruption Conviction
Year: 2013-2015 | Forum: Indonesian Corruption Court
M. Ajisatria Suleiman
September 11, 2025
How did a routine oilfield cleanup spiral into controversial corruption trials?
💡 TL;DR
In 2013, three employees of Chevron Pacific Indonesia (CPI) and its two contractors became entangled in a high-profile corruption case that sent shockwaves through both the oil industry and the environmental services sector.
Endah Rumbiyanti, a mid-level environmental manager at Chevron, had only recently taken over supervision of the project in June 2011. Together with her team, Kukuh Kertasafari and Widodo, she was responsible for overseeing the bioremediation work from Chevron’s side.
On the contractor side, Ricksy Prematuri, who had steadily risen through the ranks to become director of PT Green Planet Indonesia (GPI), was tasked with executing the fieldwork. He was one of two contractors hired for the project, the other being Herland Ompo, a director from a separate company engaged by Chevron at the same time.
In their complementary roles, Chevron supervising and the contractors implementing, Endah, Ricksy, and the rest found themselves accused of corruption. Endah’s situation was especially heartbreaking: she was named a suspect less than a year into her role and was detained by September 2012.
They were convicted of corruption after the courts concluded that the bioremediation project, a technical process for cleaning up oil-contaminated soil, had caused financial harm to the state.
But in a dramatic reversal, the Supreme Court acquitted them two years later through a judicial review (Peninjauan Kembali or PK), citing new evidence that fundamentally challenged the prosecution’s claims.
How a Routine Clean-up Became a Corruption Case 🧾⚖️
Indonesia’s oil and gas industry operates under a legal regime called the Production Sharing Contract (PSC) system (later renamed KKS, but the framework remains the same). Under this arrangement, private contractors like Chevron fund exploration and operations upfront. Later, if oil or gas is successfully extracted, they are entitled to cost recovery: 💰meaning they can claim back every eligible expense from the Indonesian state via SKK Migas (formerly BPMIGAS).
In theory, it’s a neat and investor-friendly model. In practice, it makes the government the ultimate backstop for every expense a contractor incurs, real, inflated, or even fabricated. 🧾
This is very different from Indonesia’s mining sector, where companies are responsible for their own costs. As long as they pay royalties, taxes, and penalties, the state doesn’t reimburse their operational spending. But in oil and gas, thanks to cost recovery, every contractor invoice is potentially a claim on public funds.
That’s what made this routine environmental job suddenly look suspicious under a legal microscope. Prosecutors seized on this nuance. If bioremediation costs were padded or fictitious, the overcharge wouldn’t just dent Chevron’s budget, it would be reimbursed by the Indonesian treasury. In the eyes of the law, a billing discrepancy could quickly escalate into corruption against the Republic 🇮🇩.
At the center of the storm was bioremediation, a standard environmental practice in the oil industry 🌱🛢️. It involves using naturally occurring microbes to break down hydrocarbons in oil-contaminated soil. Think of it like industrial composting: technical, highly regulated, but ultimately mundane. For a company like Chevron, it’s just another item on the environmental compliance checklist. These clean-up jobs are usually subcontracted to specialists and reviewed by internal teams, not something that sparks courtroom drama.
And yet, in this case, a series of standard soil treatments, tasks buried deep in compliance logs, ignited one of the most controversial corruption trials the sector had ever seen. 🔥👩⚖️
The core legal argument from the prosecution was this: 🧾 any inflated costs, overpayments, or fictitious billing from the bioremediation contractors would eventually be passed on to the state under Indonesia’s cost recovery scheme 💸🇮🇩. So, if Chevron paid too much or used overly expensive technology, those costs could still be claimed from the state.
Even a technical disagreement over whether a certain bioremediation method was too costly could be framed as a financial loss to the country 💰⚖️. And under this logic, any inefficiency or pricing issue that Chevron absorbed could become a burden on the state, turning what looked like a commercial dispute into a corruption case 🚨.
💼⚖️ “If It Happened to Them, It Could Happen to Us”
The case triggered strong reactions from Indonesia’s academic and professional communities, not just out of solidarity, but real concern. If routine technical work like bioremediation could lead to corruption charges, then no professional was truly safe.
Ricksy Prematury was backed by alumni from IPB University, his alma mater and the country’s top agricultural school. They saw the case as a dangerous precedent that blurred the line between honest mistakes and criminal acts. Kukuh Kertasafari received similar support from ITB, Indonesia’s top engineering university. His peers worried that technical decisions could now be criminalized.
Then there was Endah Rumbiyanti, or Rumbi, as her friends called her. A standout graduate from the University of Indonesia (UI), she was known as one of Chevron’s top employees. During much of the time the alleged “corruption” occurred, Rumbi was actually stationed in the U.S. on assignment, an award for her performance. Her prosecution shocked many who viewed her as a role model, not a criminal.
🚨 What Triggered the Legal Fallout?
Between 2006 and 2012, Chevron hired two specialist contractors to carry out bioremediation. Prosecutors, armed with multiple expert testimonies (the most prominent being that of Dr. Ir. Edison Effendi), portrayed the work as an elaborate sham.
🚫 Missing Permits, Missing Paper Trail
The contractors, prosecutors argued, had allowed their critical permits for handling B3 hazardous waste to expire. Under Kepmen LH 128/2003, all bioremediation operators must maintain up-to-date licenses. According to the state, even a single lapse meant every kilogram of soil treated became a violation of environmental law. What’s more, it appeared that Chevron staff had failed to flag or follow up on the missing paperwork.
🔬 Science or Pseudoscience?
No certified laboratory. No proper testing infrastructure. According to the indictment, the contractors were operating blind, applying microbes with no evidence that the organisms could actually degrade crude oil.
🕳️ A Cleanup That Never Cleaned, Or Never Needed Cleaning
This was the heart of the case. Prosecutors presented two sets of soil samples. In one, hydrocarbon levels remained alarmingly high even after treatment, suggesting the process had failed. In the other, the soil was already clean before treatment began, implying the entire project may have been unnecessary. Either way, the prosecution claimed, the project was a fiction, and the invoices submitted were fraudulent.
🕊️ Redemption at Last: How the Supreme Court Undid the Verdict
In every prior stage of the proceedings, the defense teams for Ricksy, Rumbi, Kukuh, and others argued the same core point: this wasn’t corruption, it was a commercial dispute. If there were problems with licensing, procedures, or performance, the proper venue was a civil court, not a corruption tribunal. These were contract disagreements between Chevron and its vendors, not crimes against the state.
Yet their pleas fell on deaf ears. Not even the Supreme Court was convinced, until 2017.
In a dramatic turn of events, the Supreme Court granted their petitions for a special judicial review, a Peninjauan Kembali (PK), and overturned all previous convictions. The Court's reversal was grounded in newly submitted evidence (novum) that dismantled the prosecution’s core narrative.
✅ No State Loss. New documents and witness testimony proved that Chevron never submitted bioremediation costs for reimbursement under the PSC scheme. Since no funds were ever claimed from the Indonesian treasury, there was no state financial loss, an essential requirement under Indonesia’s anti-corruption law.
✅ Independent Expert Rebuttals. A group of credible environmental experts discredited the earlier expert testimony. They highlighted serious flaws in the prosecution’s evidence, including:
❌ Invalid sampling methods: soil samples were allegedly taken from areas outside of the work zone.
❌ Regulatory, not criminal, issues: even if GPI had fallen short of technical standards, these were compliance matters, not evidence of corruption.
✅ No Personal Gain. Finally, there was no indication that Ricksy, Rumbi or any other defendant personally profited. All payments were made to corporate account as part of formal contracts with Chevron. There were no kickbacks, no bribes, no personal enrichment.
📌 Key Takeaways
The key takeaway is straightforward: always proceed with caution and exercise the highest level of diligence, especially when working in highly regulated sectors like oil and gas.
And after years of legal uncertainty, Ricksy, Rumbi, Kukuh, and others have finally been acquitted by the Supreme Court through a special judicial review. Some of them have returned to important roles in the oil and gas sector, including at the state oil company, demonstrating that their technical expertise remains valued and intact.
One final chapter remains, nevertheless. One suspect fled the country during the trial and now resides in the United States, reportedly still working for Chevron. Given that all the others have been acquitted, hopefully she too can finally enjoy her freedom
Source:
Decision of High Court Nomor: 28/PID/TPK/2013/PT.DKI
Decision of the Supreme Court (Cassation) No.2330 K/Pid.Sus/2013
Decision of the Supreme Court (Peninjauan Kembali) No. 36 PK/Pid.Sus/201
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