Four men once ran two of Indonesia’s best-funded venture arms.
In June, a Jakarta court sent all four of them to prison.
Donald Surjana Wihardja, the former chief executive of MDI Ventures, got five years. Nicko Widjaja, who ran the rival fund BRI Ventures, got three.
Aldi Adrian Hartanto and William Gozali, both former investment executives at the two firms, got two years each.
None of the four had pocketed a rupiah of the money. Jakarta’s anti-corruption court convicted them anyway, for what they had failed to check.
MDI Ventures, the venture arm of state telecom Telkom Indonesia, and BRI Ventures, backed by state bank Bank Rakyat Indonesia, had jointly put roughly US$25 million into TaniHub, an agritech start-up that connected Indonesian farmers to buyers and to small loans. The court found MDI Ventures liable for US$18 million (Rp290.92 billion) of the resulting state losses, and BRI Ventures for US$4.6 million (Rp73.3 billion).
Prosecutors said the executives had leaned on TaniHub’s own numbers instead of checking them.
That is the duty at the centre of the case, sometimes called a fiduciary duty: the obligation to verify a claim before committing someone else’s money to it, rather than believing it because a founder says it with confidence.
TaniHub was later separately accused of falsifying some of its own financial reporting, a pattern Indonesia would see again in the eFishery fraud case, where a fast-growing agritech company’s own backers found its reported numbers had been inflated.1 If the numbers were compromised at the source, the funds’ failure was never asking the second question.
TaniHub had already answered a smaller version of the same question years earlier, in its own back office.
In February 2022, it closed its warehouses in Bandung and Bali and laid off the staff who ran them, as it retreated from selling to households to lean on business buyers instead.
Those employees never stood in a Jakarta courtroom.
The Stoics filed this under dikaiosyne, usually translated as justice, though it meant something narrower: giving each person and each relationship exactly what you actually owe it, not more to whichever side is easiest to please.
Epictetus called it a matter of role and due.
A father owes fathering. A citizen owes citizenship. A person is judged by what they render to a relationship, not by what the relationship might have handed them instead.
Run a company and you sit inside several of these relationships at once, and they compete for the same hour of your week. You owe your investors an honest account of what you have actually verified, not an optimistic one. You owe your team the truth about the numbers their jobs are being built on.
You owe yourself the discipline of checking your own biggest claim before someone with a badge checks it for you.
The habit dikaiosyne asks for is specific and small: before you present the number that matters most this quarter, a runway figure, a growth rate, a valuation, trace it back to the raw data yourself, once, this week. Not because you expect to find fraud.
The four men sentenced in June did not expect to find it either, and that was the finding against them.
The courtroom in Jakarta will move on to its next case, its gavel falling on this file like any other. The farmers who supplied TaniHub, and the warehouse staff let go four years before anyone was sentenced, will not get a hearing of their own.
Dikaiosyne only asks that you are the one who checked the ledger, not that it balances in the end.
Dikaiosyne only asks that you are the one who checked the ledger, not that it balances in the end.
Footnotes
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TaniHub’s warehouse closures and MDI Ventures’ conviction were separate matters years apart, not one proceeding. The connection is the pattern, not a shared verdict: two of Indonesia’s most closely watched start-up stories, both turning on numbers nobody outside the company had independently run. ↩