Notarial Gatekeeping in Sovereign Investment: Formality Requirements and the Legal Consequences of Informality in Danantara's Investment Agreements

Abstract

Sovereign wealth funds are public bodies that commit capital through private-law contracts, yet scholarship on their governance has concentrated on the institutional layer of mandates, boards, and voluntary disclosure, leaving the transactional layer, where public capital is actually committed, without doctrinal attention. This study examines that layer in the case of Danantara, Indonesia's sovereign investment body established in February 2025. Using doctrinal and functional-comparative methods, it asks how Indonesian positive law regulates the involvement of civil-law notaries in Danantara's investment agreements, which transactions require an authentic instrument as a condition of validity, and what consequences follow when agreements affecting state capital are executed as private deeds. The analysis shows that the applicable formality rules are scattered across company, investment, treasury, land, and notarial legislation and are absent from the fund's own statutes. A three-tier typology distinguishing constitutive, evidentiary-functional, and discretionary formality is developed and applied to the fund's transaction modalities. Comparative evidence from Norway, Singapore, the Netherlands, and France shows that notarial gatekeeping is system-contingent. The novelty lies in reframing the authentic instrument as transaction-level verification that complements self-reported institutional governance and in proposing a proportionate formality clause for the fund's regulations.