Editorial: Who will be left to govern when every policy leads to conviction?

On Nadiem Makarim’s 10-year sentence

Two days ago, 30 June, the court sentenced former Education Minister Nadiem Makarim to ten years in prison. He also has to pay Rp 809 billion in restitution, or else serve another five years.

Nadiem has been on trial since last year for allegedly causing state losses in the procurement of Chromebooks during his term in office.

But he is not the first public official or government consultant to be named a graft suspect without ever taking a dime of public money. Apparently, under Indonesia’s corruption law, any act that can be regarded as an abuse of power resulting in state or economic losses can be charged as corruption. We’ve written about it here.

Criminalization of the Chromebook policy

The case stems from a massive Education Ministry initiative to procure hundreds of thousands of laptops for public schools across Indonesia. To ensure these devices could be managed remotely, monitored for appropriate student use, and updated securely at scale, the ministry required the laptops to include a centralized Device Management system. As Windows-based alternatives with equivalent management software were significantly more expensive, the technical requirement effectively made Google’s Chromebook the only financially viable option for the mass rollout.

State prosecutors and the court interpreted this specific technical requirement not as a cost-effective choice for cloud-based education, but as a deliberate attempt to lock the project specifications to benefit a single proprietary ecosystem, Google, forming the core of the corruption charges against Nadiem.

The alleged conflict of interest rests on the fact that Google had invested in Gojek years earlier, the company Nadiem co-founded, which he left before joining the cabinet.

The problem with treating that as proof of a quid pro quo is timing: The bulk of Google’s investment in Gojek-linked entities happened before Nadiem became minister, not after, which cuts against the idea that the Chromebook decision was payback for money he’d already received years earlier.

A prior investor relationship that predates the office in question is a weaker basis for a conflict-of-interest finding than one that develops during it. Of course, that doesn’t make the specification choice above scrutiny. Still, it’s a meaningfully different claim than “he steered a contract to a company that was paying him” – and the verdict doesn’t appear to draw that distinction.

The court also determined that the Development Finance Comptroller (BPKP)’s finding of Rp1.56 trillion in state losses was valid, even though, constitutionally, only the Supreme Audit Board (BPK) has the authority to audit government programs and determine state losses. A former BPK head testified in court that the methods used by the BPKP were dubious at best, often relying solely on sampling data. That distinction is not procedural nitpicking: an audit institution without constitutional authority to declare a state loss produced the single number the entire prosecution hangs on.

Moreover, the old audit logic was built for static assets. If a government construction project procures more cement than it needs and it hardens unused in a yard, that is an obvious, quantifiable loss.

But technology does not behave like cement. Tech procurement is inherently a bet on an ecosystem and a mass adoption curve. Today, the overwhelming majority of those Chromebooks remain operational in classrooms. Can the small fraction that is not fairly labeled a criminal state loss? If 100 percent efficiency is the benchmark for legality, then countless other flagship government initiatives are structurally criminal.

The phantom enrichment

Here is a part of the verdict that should unsettle anyone who thinks the ruling was a clean finding of guilt: the panel of judges explicitly ruled that it was not proven that Nadiem had unlawfully enriched himself. He was convicted of abuse of authority causing state losses — a separate charge — and one judge on the five-member panel dissented outright, saying he saw no convincing evidence of malicious intent.

And yet, the restitution order treats the Rp 809.59 billion as a personal financial benefit requiring repayment. That sum was never a liquid payout, a bribe, or a slush fund extracted from the state budget. It was a standard, closed-loop corporate balancing act between a parent company, PT Aplikasi Karya Anak Bangsa (AKAB), which Nadiem founded, and its subsidiary, PT Gojek Indonesia.

Ahead of the Gojek-Tokopedia (GoTo) merger and IPO, Gojek needed to clear a pre-existing debt owed to AKAB, most of which traced back to a roughly US$ 787 million investment Google had made in AKAB years earlier. Gojek issued new shares to AKAB, AKAB paid for them, and on the same day, Gojek transferred the exact same amount back to extinguish the debt. No cash left the corporate group. Not a single rupiah ever entered Nadiem’s personal pocket, and he has said he never had access to the funds.

So the court’s own finding creates a contradiction it never resolves: if it wasn’t proven that Nadiem personally benefited, on what basis does he personally owe Rp 809 billion tied to a transaction between two companies he didn’t control at the time?

Restitution in Indonesian corruption law is meant to claw back what a defendant unlawfully gained. Here, the court seems to have imposed a giant number because it was the most legible figure in the case file, not because it traced to anything Nadiem actually received. That is a more serious problem than misread accounting. It’s simply that the personal liability and the enrichment finding don’t align.

How can we expect public officials to do reforms when a jail sentence is lurking?

The immediate consequence of this legal overreach is complete bureaucratic paralysis. When any innovative policy decision can be retroactively branded an abuse of power, the incentive to reform vanishes entirely. Public officials would quickly realize that the only way to protect their freedom is to strictly maintain business as usual. The system effectively mandates safety through mediocrity, actively punishing anyone attempting to modernize state functions.

Worse, this creates a chilling effect that will permanently repel external talent from entering government service. The court’s logic in this verdict implies that simply having once held equity in a company that later interacts with state policy can be twisted into a criminal conflict of interest, years and job changes later. The state will be run exclusively by career bureaucrats who know how to navigate checklists, shutting out the expertise Indonesia needs to compete globally.

We have to talk about state losses

If “state losses” is to remain the primary weapon used to lock a professional away for a decade, the financial calculation behind it must be flawless, robust, and beyond institutional dispute. In this case, it was neither: the number came from an agency the Constitution doesn’t authorize to make that finding, using a methodology its own former leadership called unreliable.

The double standard this exposes isn’t hypothetical. While a former minister is being personally bankrupted over a disputed audit of a program that mostly worked, the current administration has been writing the opposite protection into law for its own flagship program. A financial-sector law passed this week shields purchases of bonds issued by Danantara, the sovereign wealth fund chaired by senior cabinet figures, from criminal, civil, and tax investigation. The bond records can’t even be used as evidence in court.

One government program gets audited by an agency with no constitutional standing to do so, and the finding becomes a decade in prison. Another gets statutory immunity from scrutiny by design. If the legal system can carve out investigation-proof status for the state’s biggest current bet, it is hard to argue in good faith that a defensible laptop specification from 2020 deserved the opposite treatment.

What’s next

If there is a fix, it starts with restoring BPK’s constitutional exclusivity in practice, not just on paper. No state-loss finding should support a criminal conviction unless BPK, not BPKP, produced it.

Alongside that, Indonesia needs something closer to a business-judgment standard for technical and procurement decisions made in good faith with documented rationale: the question in a courtroom should be whether an official enriched themselves or acted with corrupt intent, not whether their engineering choice turned out to be litigable in hindsight. Without that distinction, the same instrument now being used against Nadiem is available, at will, against the next official who tries to build something.

None of this is an argument for easing up on corruption enforcement. It’s the opposite. Indonesia has no shortage of cases with an actual bribe, an actual bank transfer, an actual official who got personally richer while a program collapsed. The Chromebooks still running in classrooms today are simply not that.

When prosecutors and courts spend their credibility and the public’s attention manufacturing a state loss out of a defensible technical spec, that is institutional capacity not spent on the cases where the money really did disappear, and someone really did pocket it.

Treating every costly policy bet as a potential decade in prison doesn’t make the anti-corruption regime look tougher. It makes it look undiscriminating, and it lets the real cases blend into the noise of all else being prosecuted with equal ferocity. If the goal is actually deterring theft of public money, the system needs to be able to distinguish that from a minister who made a call that didn’t pan out perfectly.