A court in Jakarta has handed a 10-year prison sentence to Nadiem Makarim, finding the Gojek founder and former cabinet minister guilty of corruption in a case that has gripped Indonesia.
The verdict
The Central Jakarta District Court convicted Makarim on Tuesday of corruption and abuse of his authority as a minister, Bloomberg reported. The 10-year term was considerably lighter than the 18 years prosecutors had sought, and he was also ordered to pay substantial fines and restitution. Makarim said he would appeal, according to Tempo.
The Chromebook case
The case centers on a program, run while Makarim was education minister, to buy hundreds of thousands of Chromebook laptops for schools during the pandemic. Prosecutors alleged that the procurement process was steered toward Chromebooks despite earlier testing that questioned their suitability for Indonesian classrooms, particularly in rural areas with patchy internet, and that the scheme caused state losses of about 2.2 trillion rupiah (roughly $135 million).
His defense
Makarim has maintained his innocence throughout. He has said he never personally signed the procurement documents and that the decision to use Chromebooks was made lawfully by technical teams seeking to keep costs down, noting that the devices were cheaper than rivals. His ministry, he has said, distributed more than a million laptops to tens of thousands of schools across the country.
From start-up star to minister
Makarim, in his early 40s, is among Indonesia's most prominent entrepreneurs. He founded Gojek in 2010 as a service to summon motorcycle taxis, and it grew into a sprawling app for transport, food delivery and payments — Southeast Asia's first start-up valued above $10 billion. In 2021 Gojek merged with the e-commerce firm Tokopedia to create GoTo, the country's largest technology group; Makarim had already stepped away from running it. In 2019, President Joko Widodo appointed him education minister, a post he held until 2024, during which he scrapped the national school examination and promoted a curriculum overhaul branded "Freedom to Learn."
A high-profile reckoning
The conviction is among the most prominent secured by Indonesia's Corruption Eradication Commission, the anti-graft agency that has long pursued officials across government. For a figure once held up as a symbol of the country's tech ambitions, it is a striking reversal — though, with an appeal promised, the legal fight is not yet over.
