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Elisa Valenta · · 7 min readGojek founder trial exposes policy risk for Indonesia’s investors
With additional reporting by Jofie Yordan
Indonesia’s high-profile trial of former education minister and Gojek co-founder Nadiem Makarim is shaping up to be more than a corruption case. Investors and tech leaders are watching it as a test of where flawed policymaking could cross into criminal liability.
The allegations relate to a program from 2019 to 2022 involving the procurement of 1.2 million laptops for schools in the country. Makarim co-founded Gojek – now part of GoTo Group – in 2010, long before he entered government in 2019.
The Nadiem Makarim case shows the risks facing investors and executives when dealing with government-linked projects in Indonesia, analysts say. / Photo credit: World Economic Forum / Sikarin Thanachaiary
Prosecutors said the program, which caused significant state losses, favored devices running Google’s operating system.
The heart of the case
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Indonesia’s education ministry launched a digitalization program to accelerate the use of technology in classrooms by distributing laptops to schools across the archipelago.
However, doubts over the program emerged in May 2025, when the Attorney-General’s Office of Indonesia (AGO) began investigating the procurement process.
In a charge read out in court, prosecutors said that the education ministry procured about 1.2 million Chromebook laptops between 2020 and 2022, despite internal recommendations favoring devices that run on Microsoft Windows. The total budget was estimated at around 10 trillion rupiah (US$580 million).
The prosecutors alleged that Makarim carried out the procurement in a manner that deviated from the original plan, violating established public procurement principles.
Investigators also alleged that some vendors sold the laptops to the government at inflated prices, contributing to estimated state losses of more than 2.1 trillion rupiah (US$122 million).
The charges
The case escalated on September 4, 2025, when the AGO announced that Makarim had been formally named a suspect and detained in connection with the investigation.
Prosecutors also named four other suspects, including Ibrahim Arief, a former vice president at ecommerce platform Bukalapak, who at the time was a consultant to the Ministry of Education’s digitalization program.
See also: Indonesia’s Chromebook corruption probe, in visuals
Prosecutors further alleged that the procurement process was manipulated in ways that benefited certain suppliers and promoted the adoption of ChromeOS devices in the national education system.
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Beyond the courtroom
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Nadiem Makarim, who became education minister in 2019, has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Here’s why the case matters to the tech world.
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