Published on March 16, 2026, by Bloomberg
By Ambereen Choudhury, Faris Mokhtar, Echo Wong, and Harry Suhartono
At an invitation-only dinner in the Grand Hyatt Jakarta last August, the chief executive officer of Indonesia’s fledgling sovereign wealth fund rounded up about 30 individuals from the country’s richest families and made a plea.
The state investor, Danantara, wanted the business elite to participate in a nation-building effort by purchasing “Patriot bonds” that would finance projects with social benefits. CEO Rosan Roeslani said that would help realize President Prabowo Subianto’s vision, according to people with knowledge of the private gathering who asked not to be named.
Following his eight-minute speech, attendees were handed documents with the terms: securities with a 2% coupon — far below rates on local government bonds — that mature in five and seven years. Some tycoons felt pressured to contribute to safeguard their relationships with the country’s leaders, people familiar with their thinking said. The bond offerings that followed raised $3.6 billion. A Danantara spokesperson stressed that the contributions were voluntary.
Still, to the fund’s critics, the episode is emblematic of the doubts about governance, mandate and focus that surround the whirlwind new endeavor. In its first year, Danantara has injected about $1.4 billion into a struggling national airline, bought property in the ancient Saudi Arabian city of Mecca, and is overseeing land parcels the size of Switzerland that Indonesia’s government has seized from more than two dozen companies. During a violent two-day market selloff in January, government officials asked Danantara to step in and help restore investor confidence.
Prabowo, in an interview over the weekend, said he would like Danantara to achieve at least a 5% return on assets, or $50 billion a year based on its self-estimated total assets of $1 trillion. He also signaled that the fund would likely control more national assets, similar to its Middle Eastern peers.
The evolving mandates are creating confusion among business executives, bankers, and global asset managers about Danantara’s governance and strategy, and have made some wary about working with it, according to people familiar with the matter. International investors have questioned the sovereign fund’s long-term commitment and staying power given Indonesia’s political uncertainties, the people said. At investor gatherings, some attendees have also brought up corruption risks and asked Danantara executives how they would be addressed.
Knut Kjaer, the founding CEO of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, said Danantara’s recent moves could erode overseas investors’ confidence. “That may harm the role it can play in the global capital markets and for Indonesia,” he said.
Danantara, which has billed itself as the world’s seventh-largest sovereign fund, rejects broader suggestions that it has weak governance and conflicting investment objectives. A spokesperson said the fund “recognizes that, as a relatively new institution, market participants may seek clarity regarding mandate and long-term strategy.” They added that it operates within Indonesia’s laws, has multilayered oversight, and is working to strengthen governance frameworks and disclosure practices.
The fund also sees criticism of it as missing the mark. Prabowo regards Danantara as a vehicle to grow and preserve the country’s wealth. The 74-year-old president and former military commander has previously railed about money leaving the country, and criticized business elites for parking funds overseas while enriching themselves at home. He sees the new vehicle as an opportunity to manage and grow the country’s wealth, generate investment returns and advance his socialist agenda and Indonesia’s economic goals.
The fund did not make Rosan available for an interview. The Government Communications Agency, which handles the president’s communications, didn’t reply to requests for comment on specific points in this article.
This account of Danantara’s first year is based on interviews with more than 20 individuals familiar with the fund’s inner workings and its interactions with domestic and international institutions, presentations from its meetings, public documents and speeches by its executives.
Sovereign Fund’s Origins
Danantara, whose name means “energy for the archipelago’s future” in Bahasa Indonesia, was stitched together last February from a patchwork of government stakes in companies including banks, utility providers and manufacturers. State-owned enterprises account for close to half the country’s commercial banking sector’s assets, and dominate the energy and infrastructure industries.
Inside Danantara, employees see the fund as akin to a startup. It first occupied a mansion-like space owned by Bank Mandiri, the country’s largest state-owned lender. But there was a rat problem and employees moved to a similar property owned by another bank, according to people familiar with the matter.
They then shifted to a swanky office tower in Jakarta’s central business district that housed Bank Mandiri’s headquarters, taking up several floors. The previous occupants were unhappy they had to vacate the space, and cleared out items including furniture, trash cans, water dispensers, power cables and toilet paper, leaving Danantara staffers scrambling to order new supplies after they moved in, according to people familiar with the matter. The building that used to be known as Plaza Mandiri was renamed Wisma Danantara Indonesia in June.
The Indonesian fund was originally designed to mimic neighboring Singapore’s rich and prominent state investors Temasek Holdings Pte and GIC Pte. Temasek reported a net portfolio value of S$434 billion ($339 billion) last March, while GIC, which invests mostly abroad, is estimated to manage more than $900 billion.
The Norwegian fund Kjaer used to oversee, Norges Bank Investment Management, was started in the 1990s and is currently the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund. The market value of its assets, which include shares in companies, fixed income and real estate, was around $2.1 trillion this month.
Unlike rich countries with large oil surpluses or deep pools of pension savings, Indonesia has run budget deficits for years. Danantara earlier had a $900 billion estimate of its assets, which was based on the total assets of its state-owned companies.
Indonesian state-owned enterprises had the equivalent of about $650 billion in total assets, excluding liabilities, as of December 2024, according to a government report. The combined market capitalization of the 10 largest publicly listed state-owned companies was roughly $100 billion at the end of last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg News, less than a third of their reported total assets the previous year.
Danantara has hired accounting firm Ernst & Young and could release its first financial report in June, people familiar with the matter said. EY did not respond to requests for comment.
Danantara has two main divisions: an asset management arm that oversees the state-owned enterprises, and an investment management arm. Together, they house about 400 employees, and are growing. The state-owned firms pay around $8 billion in annual dividends, cash that the fund’s executives plan to combine with other financing to invest domestically and abroad. It has invested several billion dollars to date.
“I have a muscle to invest $200 billion for the next five years,” Rosan said in February during a conference in Jakarta organized by a Singapore media outlet. He said the estimated figure for potential investment was based on expectations Danantara could get four times’ leverage for the collected dividends, which principally come from 12 companies.
The fund has obtained a $1 billion loan from foreign banks that include HSBC Holdings Plc and Standard Chartered Plc. Lenders used projections from the fund and internal research to assess Danantara’s ability to repay its debt, according to people familiar with the matter.
President’s Vision
Of all of Prabowo’s policy rollouts since he assumed the presidency in October 2024, he’s most fond of Danantara. Creating a sovereign wealth fund was once the vision of his late father, an economist and ex-finance minister.
Prabowo oversees Danantara’s supervisory board and appointed Rosan, an ex-ambassador to the US who ran his presidential campaign, as CEO. Rosan speaks with Prabowo almost daily and visits the president’s countryside home regularly to give him updates on the fund, according to people familiar with their interactions.
Prabowo sees Danantara as a pool of money — on top of the state budget — to fund his expansive and costly socialist policies, which he believes could propel Indonesia to reach 8% GDP growth. That level was last achieved decades ago during the dictator Suharto’s administration. Growth more recently has been closer to 5%, and the country’s GDP per capita is roughly $5,000.
During several cabinet meetings last year, Prabowo pointed to Danantara as a source of financing for local projects. In one case, the administration plans to establish more than 60 fishing villages as part of an effort to modernize the sector and improve local livelihoods. When some ministers asked how the project would be financed, Prabowo said Danantara would fund it, people familiar said.
Prabowo has also criticized Indonesia’s state-owned enterprises as poorly run and failing to generate sufficient profits. During a mid-2025 gathering of commissioners and top executives of the companies, Prabowo said he was ashamed of their performance, which needed to improve, according to people who were present. Those who didn’t agree with his plans for reforms should leave, he told attendees.
Danantara has been tasked with restructuring the companies. State-owned oil firm Pertamina, for instance, will focus on energy resilience and divest assets such as hotels that aren’t part of its core business. Danantara has also outlined plans to consolidate more than 1,000 state-owned enterprises and their subsidiaries into around 220 in three to four years.
Over the past 12 months, Danantara executives have jetted around the world’s business and financial hubs to raise the sovereign fund’s profile, scout for investments and ink deals. During meetings with banks, credit raters and consulting firms, some attendees brought up 1Malaysia Development Bhd., the Malaysian state investment fund whose funds were embezzled, and pressed Danantara’s officials on how they would prevent money from being misused, according to people familiar with the matter.
“I think Danantara is the most watched institution in Indonesia,” Prabowo said in the Bloomberg News interview on Saturday in response to the comparisons, adding that the fund has a board of supervisors, ministers, state audit agencies and risk committees keeping a close eye on it.
Concerns about potential corruption have come up frequently in external meetings, acknowledged Pandu Sjahrir, Danantara’s chief investment officer. “People were asking, ‘What are you doing? You’re centralizing all these businesses — are you going to be corrupt?’ Because the idea of corruption is significant,” he said last October at the Milken Institute summit in Singapore.
In some private meetings, Pandu has joked that fellow countrymen have likened him to Malaysian financier Jho Low, a central figure in Malaysia’s 1MDB scandal, according to people familiar with his comments.
“This is not true. Framing Danantara Indonesia or any of its executives through such an analogy is inaccurate and misleading,” a spokesperson for the fund said.
A 2025 law shields Danantara’s board, executives, and staff from liability for losses at the fund or its portfolio companies, as long as they acted in good faith. Still, some senior investment staff are wary that missteps could expose them to corruption charges — for instance, if a future government revisits decisions that caused losses to the state.
To build credibility, Danantara last March created an advisory board whose members at the time included Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, former Credit Suisse banker Helman Sitohang, economist Jeffrey Sachs, ex-Thai premier Thaksin Shinawatra, and retired Capital Group partner and portfolio manager F. Chapman Taylor.
Dalio subsequently decided not to be part of the advisory board, people familiar with the matter said last May. In June, he said he would be an informal advisor. “My commitment to advise its leadership and President Prabowo remains unchanged — informal, voluntary and unpaid,” Dalio said in an emailed response to Bloomberg News in January.
He has met over Zoom with Danantara executives, while Taylor has flown to Jakarta to provide advice in person, according to people familiar with the interactions. Sitohang last year expressed concerns about the patriot bonds program and questioned if it could hurt market confidence among Indonesia’s tycoons, according to people familiar with the matter. Danantara is planning to sell an additional $1.2 billion in patriot bonds in the coming months.
“The requirement of asking billionaires to buy patriot bonds feels like a pay-to-play scheme,” said Mark Williams, master lecturer in finance at Boston University.
Taylor declined to comment. Sitohang and Sachs didn’t respond to requests for comment, while Thaksin is serving a one-year prison sentence for alleged corruption and abuse of power and couldn’t be reached. “Danantara routinely receives feedback from senior industry figures and values constructive input regarding funding instruments and investor confidence,” its spokesperson said.
Pandu said in a recent blog post that ultimately, it all boils down to trust. “Trust is everything, and it isn’t built overnight,” he wrote. “It is earned through transparency, governance, and consistency in decision-making.”
Danantara has so far mandated money managers including BNP Asset Management and Manulife Investment Management to help it invest in public equities, and announced a string of investment partnerships with sovereign peers such as the Russian Direct Investment Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority and China Investment Corp. to jointly explore deals.
Pandu said in January that Danantara intends to deploy around $12 billion across projects, direct investments and public markets. That month, some of its managing directors flew to the US and had close to 50 meetings over 10 days with private equity firms, venture capital funds and companies that Danantara is considering investing in, people familiar with the matter said.
In early February, more than 300 of Danantara’s top executives and employees went for an overnight retreat at a hotel in the mountainside city of Bandung to mark its first-year anniversary, taking a 15-minute high-speed rail from Jakarta. In a speech, Rosan said the expectations of Danantara are high and immense, and unlike other sovereign wealth funds, it doesn’t have much time to prove itself. He described the pace as akin to a baby who has to immediately run, according to attendees.
Prabowo told Danantara employees last week that going forward, the sovereign fund will be expected to deliver a return on assets of 10% to 15% annually. “With good management, disciplined governance, and strong commitment, state asset management performance can improve significantly,” he said, while cautioning that challenges still lie ahead.
“Many state enterprises are expected to deliver profits while absorbing social and political objectives that structurally depress returns,” said Larry Luckey, a Jakarta-based senior executive who has advised or worked for various companies in the country. “Unless Danantara can enforce real governance authority over boards, budgets, and management, scale alone will not translate into performance or credibility.”
— With assistance from Jin Wu, Ben Otto, Anto Antony, and Daniel Ten Kate