This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on May 4, 2026 - May 10, 2026

Indonesian aquaculture company eFishery’s co-founder Gibran Huzaifah was handed a nine-year prison sentence last Wednesday for embezzlement and money laundering, concluding a high-profile US$300 million scandal that not only crushed what was one of Southeast Asia’s most celebrated unicorns but also serves as a lesson for several high-profile investors, including Japanese conglomerate Softbank Group and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd. The lesson is perhaps more reputational for the wealthier funds.

For Kumpulan Wang Persaraan Diperbadankan (KWAP), which invested US$47.7 million or about 24% of eFishery’s US$200 million Series D funding round in July 2023, the RM200 million eFishery lesson is expensive even though it is only 0.1% of its fund size and about 1.1% of its hitherto highest annual investment income of RM18 billion in 2024.

The RM200 million would have been enough to give about RM9 each to 22 million adult Malaysians and is about 6% of Putrajaya’s monthly retirement charges burden of RM3.83 billion (RM40.06 billion annually) in 2024.

That RM200 million is also easily four times the much-criticised high-profile RM43.9 million investment loss at FashionValet Sdn Bhd suffered by Khazanah Nasional Bhd and Permodalan Nasional Bhd, which invested RM27 million and RM20 million respectively but exited with only RM3.1 million collectively. Some observers note that FashionValet was at least founded by Malaysians while eFishery’s founders were Indonesian.

Yet, with KWAP’s fund size of RM200 billion not being able to grow fast enough to carry Malaysia’s public pension burden for the foreseeable future without sizeable cash injections, every ringgit should count.

This rings even louder as the world faces up to the impact of the still-developing Middle East conflict. With a fuel subsidy bill running at RM7 billion a month, Putrajaya on April 29 instructed all of its ministries, departments and agencies to review spending and propose operating expenditure cuts by May 15.

At press time, KWAP had yet to replace Datuk Nik Amlizan Mohamed, who served as CEO from November 2020 to end-March 2026. The efishery episode serves as an expensive lesson, not just for the fund’s incoming CEO, but for every steward of public money.

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