The South Jakarta District Prosecutor’s Office has detained MDI Ventures CEO Donald Wihardja along with TaniHub’s former President Director Ivan Arie Setiawan and former Director Edison Tobing today, according to various media reports.
The detentions were part of an ongoing investigation into the alleged corruption and money laundering tied to the management of investment funds into TaniHub and affiliated organisations by MDI Ventures and BRI Ventures between 2019 and 2023.
The three accused people will remain in custody until August 16.
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According to an official, preliminary findings suggested that Wihardja allegedly approved the disbursement of funds illegally while Setiawan and Tobing were suspected of manipulating data to secure funding from the investors. It is also said that the funds were later misappropriated for personal use.
The authorities are also examining the possibilities of other parties’ involvement and the flow of the allegedly misused funds. They conducted raids at various locations in the Greater Jakarta Area and secured evidence in the form of electronic devices and documents.
Founded in 2016, TaniHub is an agritech startup that helps farmers improve their livelihood. It offers products ranging from agricultural commodities trading to a P2P lending platform TaniFund.
In 2024, Indonesia’s Financial Services Authority (OJK) revoked TaniFund’s business license for failing to comply with regulatory directives and meet the minimum equity requirements. Following sanctions and supervisory actions, a growing number of complaints and legal actions led OJK to hand over the case to law enforcement for further investigations.
e27 contacted a former TaniHub employee who was open to sharing about his experiences at the company. The individual, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke about how the financial record of the department that he ran often had additional “vague expenses” called the Special Projects.
“When I asked about this, the CEO just said, ‘You don’t need to know the details, but you are mature enough to know that sometimes there are things we need to spend for our business partners’,” the person said.
After leaving TaniHub, the ex-staffer pursued an MBA at a leading global university and wrote about the mismanagement for an assignment. He highlighted the management’s “habit of presenting exaggerated and inaccurate metrics in order to paint a promising image to the investors.”
“The founders sometimes spoke to the employee about the importance of raising more funds by framing it as an important way to support the company’s mission in helping farmers. The logic goes that the effort to help farmers requires the company to invest capital in infrastructure as well as needing a strong cash position to support an intensive operation cost,” he wrote. “In other words, there might be some dishonesty involved, but ultimately they claimed it was to support the greater good.”
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He also gave examples of the shady practices, including TaniFund’s claim of a 100 per cent successful repayment rate of its borrowers, which he described as “defying common sense.” “Any credit business has an inherent element of risk, and there is no way among the 1,500 farmers who received a loan from TaniFund that nobody has faced harvest failure.”
“So what happened? To put it simply, when the farmers failed to repay their loan, TaniFund does not report the project as a failure to the lender. Instead, they report the project as a success, and they used their cash to repay the lender,” he remarked.
“By doing this, they indeed lose money, but they reported it on TaniHub’s financial statement as a loss that is called ‘produce breakage’, which is an unavoidable loss when you are trading perishable goods,” the person said.
More on this story as it develops.
The post “Special Projects” and shady metrics: TaniHub whistleblower speaks as top execs detained appeared first on e27.