Nominee Agreements in Bali Are Now a Criminal Offence

What Perda 4/2026 actually does

Perda 4/2026 — its full title covers the control of productive land conversion and the prohibition of nominee land ownership — was signed by Governor Wayan Koster on 24 February 2026. It is a Bali provincial regulation, so it sits below national law but applies specifically and only within Bali province.

The headline change is criminal exposure, not the underlying illegality. Nominee land structures were already unenforceable under Article 26(2) of the Basic Agrarian Law (UUPA), which voids any arrangement that gives a foreigner effective control of land registered to an Indonesian citizen. That was always a civil matter: the arrangement simply had no legal force if it was ever challenged. Perda 4/2026 adds up to five years' imprisonment and a fine of IDR 1,000,000,000 for the act of arranging the structure itself, independent of whether the underlying agreement is ever tested in court.

Who is exposed now

The Perda's practical significance is less about the foreigner and the nominee, who were already exposed under national law, and more about who else it names. Intermediaries and facilitators who help arrange, document or execute a nominee structure fall within its scope — a wider net than most existing guidance on nominee risk describes, and one that reaches agents and consultants who have historically treated the arrangement as a routine service.

How big is the problem this targets

Estimating how much Bali property sits under nominee structures is difficult, because the arrangements are private and undocumented by design. A figure circulating in 2026 coverage — roughly 10,500 land plots, worth an estimated USD 10.4 billion, held via nominee structures — is attributed to an advocacy group known as the Indonesian Nominee Crisis Working Group (K3NI). That figure is repeated across several property-industry sources, but its underlying methodology was not published anywhere independently verifiable in this research. Treat it as evidence the practice is widespread, not as an audited statistic.

If you already hold land through a nominee

The Perda, as reported in the sources available for this article, does not clearly spell out how it treats structures set up before 24 February 2026. Whether the criminal provisions reach back to existing arrangements, as opposed to only new ones, was not confirmed in any source found. That question needs an Indonesian lawyer's answer for your specific situation before you do anything, including restructuring — unwinding a nominee arrangement badly can create new exposure of its own.

• Get advice from an Indonesian lawyer, not the agent who sold you the structure — their incentive is to keep you calm, not to tell you the exposure.
• Do not sign anything that purports to 'convert' the arrangement without independent legal review; a badly drafted conversion can itself look like a fresh nominee structure.
• The lawful alternatives are a leasehold, Hak Pakai if you hold a qualifying residence permit, or Hak Guna Bangunan through a PT PMA if the property earns rental income.

What is still unverified

The facts above are drawn from law-firm and property-industry reporting on the Perda, not from the Bali provincial government's own gazette (jdih.baliprov.go.id) or an equivalent primary legal text, which was not located during this research. Before acting on this regulation — restructuring, walking away from a deal, or anything else — verify the current text and its transitional provisions with an Indonesian notary or lawyer.

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