Gibran Huzaifah, the founder of Indonesian aquaculture technology startup eFishery, has been detained by Indonesian police.
He and two others are being investigated for inflating financial statements in order to dupe investors into funding the company in excess of USD 1 billion (EUR 861 million).
The Bandung, Indonesia-based startup, which began by renting automated feeders to small fish and shrimp farmers, morphed into a one-stop shop for aquaculture feed and financing.
In February 2024, as the company expanded into India, Huzaifah said that he hoped eFishery would “empower farmers to make informed, data-driven decisions promptly."
"The focus is on refining farm operations, optimizing cultivation practices, and enhancing overall yield," he said at the time.
By the end of that year, however, Huzaifah was suspended by eFishery, along with co-founder Chrisna Aditya, after law enforcement began to investigate financial discrepancies related to the two, who together held about 9 percent of the company’s shares.
According to Reuters, Indonesian National Police Director of Special Economic Crime Helfi Assegaf said that Huzaifah has now been detained since 31 July, along with two other company executives, Angga Hadrian Raditya and Andri Yadi.
Assegaf reportedly told the press that “the three [detained individuals] collaborated to carry out fraud and embezzlement on the investment process of eFishery by marking up the investment.”
In an April 2025 interview with Bloomberg, Huzaifah admitted that he had manipulated eFishery’s financial reports to stave off the company’s collapse from 2018 onward.
By inflating his company’s earnings, Huzaifah was able to convince some of Asia’s most high profile investors, including Japan’s SoftBank Group, Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, Abu Dhabi’s 42XFund, and even Malaysia’s state pension fund, to continue funding his business.
Huzaifah told Bloomberg that he wasn’t proud of his actions but that he felt he had to “do [them] to survive” at the time.
Though he admitted his misconduct, Huzaifah defended his motives and cleared the majority of eFishery's employees of wrongdoing. He explained that he had simply hoped to keep his company afloat, rather than profit, from the inflated earnings reports.
An investigation by eFishery's board later revealed the scale of the misconduct, showing that, for instance, in the first nine months of 2024, the company told investors that it had made USD 16 million (EUR 13.8 million) in profit.
Instead, the investigation found, the company had actually lost USD 35.4 million (EUR 30.5 million) in that period.
As of April 2025, at least USD 300 million (EUR 258 million) in investments had been lost.
The eFishery board hired FTI Consulting Singapore Pte to take over its management in February, saying at the time that the move was necessitated by the alleged misconduct.
In a recent presentation to investors, FTI reportedly told the board that the company was not “commercially viable in its current form” and recommended that the business be closed and available funds returned to investors.
