The Great Escape: How Indonesia’s “New Guard” Learned All the Old Tricks
They promised a break from the past. What we got was the past, but in better packaging. Inside Indonesia’s accountability crisis.
We weren’t supposed to be here again.
The so-called “new guard” of Indonesia promised something different. They told us, directly and indirectly, that they were the break from the past. They were not the cigar-puffing tycoons of the Suharto era or the slick operators of the 2000s. They were modern, patriotic, globally educated, fluent in the language of reform.
So why are an increasing number of them now leading Indonesia’s fugitive lists instead of leading its future?
This past year alone gave us Adrian Gunadi, once praised as a fintech visionary, now reportedly living comfortably in Qatar while facing fraud allegations. Jurist Tan, a former ministerial aide tied to the Chromebook procurement scandal, seems to have chosen Sydney over facing questioning back home. Interpol red notices are now part of Indonesia's national conversation.
It’s jarring. It’s disappointing. But if we are brutally honest, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. When you scratch the surface, the “new guard” starts to look a lot like the old one, just with better branding.
The “New Guard” Was Supposed to Be Different
For the past decade, Indonesia’s emerging class of founders and startup-era elites told a compelling story. They framed themselves as part of a national mission. At conferences they spoke of nation-building as though their apps were laying the foundations of democracy. On LinkedIn, there was no shortage of solemn declarations about duty to country, about “building Indonesia’s future” one Series B round at a time.
This narrative had real pull. It promised a break from the past, a clean severing of ties to the KKN era of corruption, collusion, and nepotism that shaped the 1980s through the early 2000s. People wanted to believe these founders were not only different but better, driven by ideals rather than the transactional instincts of previous generations.
As the headlines mount, the promises look flimsy. When prosecutors and regulators start asking questions, those “nation-building” missions seem to convert with remarkable speed into one-way tickets from Soekarno-Hatta.
And there is déjà vu here.
Djoko Tjandra fled Bank Bali charges in 1999 and lived comfortably overseas for a decade.
Eddy Tansil tunneled out of prison in 1996 and vanished.
Bambang Sutrisno slipped away to Singapore after his own banking scandal.
Today’s fintech founders and tech advisors have only updated the formatting. The fraud is digital, the flights are faster, and the explanations come with better PR. It’s a “new era” on paper, but the storyline is familiar. Right down to the sudden urgency to be anywhere but home when the heat comes.
The Apple Didn’t Fall Far
We wanted to believe this “new guard” was genuinely new. We convinced ourselves that a younger generation of founders and advisors had broken free from the baggage of the past.
The reality is harder to swallow. Many of these figures were not “new” at all.
Look closer and the picture sharpens. These are the same elite networks with a fresh coat of paint. The children, nieces and nephews of long-established power brokers now headline the startup scene. The Jakarta 1% did not dissolve into history. It sent its offspring to the same international schools, the same foreign universities and the same ski trips, before they came home to launch “nation-building” companies.
These are not blank-slate disruptors who invented a new way of doing business. They grew up watching the old rulebook in action. They saw uncles or family friends quietly leave for Singapore when investigations started. They saw those same figures return years later with reputations barely dented and fortunes perfectly intact.
Is it really surprising that they absorbed the lesson: when the heat rises, there is always an exit gate?
What they inherited was not only wealth but a template for escape, one proven to work for decades. Only now it comes dressed with the language of innovation, as if a few English buzzwords could disguise the fact that the underlying instincts never changed at all.
Investor Confidence Meets Déjà Vu
This isn’t just a domestic disappointment. It is an international optics disaster.
Foreign investors were not only buying equity in these companies. They were buying into a story. That story was simple but powerful:
“This isn’t the Indonesia of the 1990s. This is the new Indonesia. Clean, modern, investable.”
That pitch worked. It brought in venture capital from Singapore and beyond. It reassured private equity firms and development banks that their money was safe in an environment that was supposedly different from the scandal-stained decades before.
But every time a high-profile founder under investigation surfaces in Qatar or an “inspirational” executive is photographed enjoying life in Sydney, the story falls apart. Investors are not naïve. They know corruption exists everywhere. What unsettles them is the pattern. It begins to feel like accountability is optional, and can be shrugged off by the well-connected.
For global funds, that realization chips away at trust in the system itself. They ask quietly, “If even the faces of the new Indonesia run when things get difficult, who is left to believe in?”
The damage isn’t limited to investors. Ordinary Indonesians see the same headlines and feel the sting of betrayal. If the “new generation” they were urged to rally behind behaves no differently from the old one, cynicism hardens. It spreads quickly and lingers even longer, corroding the very belief that things could change.
Are We Shocked Or Were We Always in Denial?
The sting here is not only the scandals themselves. It is the sense of betrayed expectation.
For years, we told ourselves that this time would be different. This time, the faces leading Indonesia’s growth were not the same ones sitting in smoke-filled boardrooms or pulling strings behind closed doors. They were:
The tech founders giving TEDx talks about “changing the game.” They were
The “nation-building” CEOs raising Series B funding and promising impact as well as profit
The Western-educated advisors speaking confidently about reform and transparency on television panels.
We wanted to believe them. Many of us did.
But the closer you look, the less the story holds. The networks did not change. The habits did not change. The instinct to protect oneself first and to seek the exit when trouble comes certainly did not change.
There were the Bank Century fugitives of the 2000s, the Bank Bali fugitives of the late ’90s, and now, in 2025, the fintech fugitives and ministerial advisors who have slipped into the same old routine.
This was not a generational break. It was generational continuity. The promise of “different” was, in the end, only packaging.
So here we are.
A generation that promised to break the cycle of scandal and exile has instead slotted neatly into it. They added a sheen of modernity, but the substance stayed the same: self-preservation before accountability.
It is easy to feel weary, to shrug and say “of course.” Yet that resignation is part of the problem. There is a choice in front of Indonesia.
Do we keep convincing ourselves that a younger face and a Western education automatically equal better ethics? Or do we finally look at the spider web for what it is. The dense tangle of family ties, social overlaps, and quiet understandings that make exile seem like an acceptable escape hatch for the powerful?
Because if that web stays untouched, nothing truly changes. Indonesia will not just produce more fugitives. It will produce the same tired story again and again.
The question is whether the country is ready to demand a different ending, or whether we will settle for watching the same script play out indefinitely.
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