Members of Parliament drawn from the united Opposition have intensified their criticism of the Finance Bill 2026 process, alleging that the Majority side pushed the legislation through its second reading without adequate input from all lawmakers.
Addressing the media at Parliament, the MPs claimed the Bill advanced at an unexpectedly rapid pace, thereby limiting participation and undermining parliamentary scrutiny of key tax proposals. They argue that the manner in which the debate was managed reflects a deliberate strategy to fast-track the approval of controversial tax measures.
Kajiado North MP Onesmus Ngogoyo stated that the process denied members a fair opportunity to formally express their position through a division vote and questioned how the Bill reached its second reading.
“We called for a division, 31 members, and the Speaker refused for us to be head counted so that people will know who voted yes and who voted no to the Finance Bill as it was proposed,” he said.
He further argued that the House debated a published Bill while committee proposals and amendments had not been formally released at the time of the debate.
“What was before the National Assembly this morning and yesterday was the Finance Bill as it was published. The report of the committee… has not been proposed,” he said, adding that MPs were effectively being pressured into voting before full scrutiny.
Ngogoyo also warned that changes affecting second-hand clothing traders could have indirect cost implications, despite claims of tax relief.
“It is true they want to zero-rate the issue of mitumba, but what they are not telling you is that the VAT that people who trade in that business have been claiming, they will not be able to claim,” he explained.
Jack Wamboka, MP for Bumula, also accused the Majority side of compressing debate and limiting participation, stating that fewer than 20 MPs were permitted to contribute meaningfully.
“Less than 20 people have contributed to the Finance Bill this morning, and Osoro laid an ambush to us and from there he brought that thing,” he said.
Wamboka argued that the Bill imposes broad-based taxation on digital platforms and everyday transactions, warning of rising cost pressures across essential services.
“They are taxing digital platforms big time. People paying for medical services in hospitals are going to be taxed. Parents paying school fees as low as 200 shillings are going to be taxed,” he stated.
He added that mobile and digital payment systems would be affected, increasing the cost of basic transactions.
Kathiani MP Robert Mbui accused the Majority side of abandoning full debate in favour of expedited voting procedures, suggesting that Parliament risks losing its deliberative role.
“It is the first time that the Majority has conceded defeat by rushing to the media to explain what was happening on the floor of the House,” he said.
Mbui insisted that Parliament should prioritise debate over voting pressure, especially on a major tax law.
“This House cannot turn into a voting machine. We must be able to debate and articulate our issues,” he emphasised.
He also clarified that clause-by-clause scrutiny belongs to the committee stage, not the second reading, and said amendments would be introduced after the debate concludes.
His Matungulu counterpart, Stephen Mule, spoke on technical provisions in the Bill, citing VAT and excise duty changes affecting digital finance and imports.
“Part three of VAT, section 21A, contains the schedule for Value Added Tax amendments,” he said.
Mule argued that mobile money platforms such as M-Pesa and Airtel Money could be affected, warning of what he termed double taxation on everyday transactions.
“When they pay via M-Pesa, they are being taxed again. That is double taxation,” he asserted.
He also raised concern over excise duty structures on imported mobile phones, stating that costs would ultimately be transferred to consumers.
The political truce between President William Ruto’s United Democratic Alliance (UDA) and Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) is facing its most serious test yet after a bitter dispute emerged over the government’s Sh2 billion compensation programme for victims of police brutality and political protests.
What was intended to be a landmark reconciliation initiative has instead exposed growing mistrust within the broad-based government arrangement, with senior ODM figures accusing State House of sidelining the party from a key promise contained in the March 2025 cooperation pact between the two former rivals.
The fallout burst into the open this week during a State House ceremony where President Ruto received a framework prepared by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights for compensating victims of human rights abuses and families of those killed during anti-government demonstrations. The compensation programme is expected to benefit more than 1,800 victims and has been allocated Sh2 billion by the government.
However, instead of showcasing unity between the coalition partners, the event highlighted simmering tensions within ODM.
ODM leader Oburu Oginga used the occasion to publicly express his dissatisfaction after arriving when the ceremony was already underway, claiming he had not been properly invited. In remarks that caught the attention of political observers, Oginga suggested that the treatment reflected the absence of his brother, Raila Odinga, who has been the chief architect of the UDA-ODM rapprochement.
The compensation agenda occupies a special place within ODM’s political calculations. It was one of the flagship commitments contained in the ten-point agreement signed by President Ruto and Raila Odinga in March 2025, a deal that laid the foundation for the broad-based government and eased months of political hostility.
For ODM, compensation is more than a government programme. It is a politically sensitive issue tied to the party’s traditional support base, many of whom suffered injuries, arrests, deaths and economic losses during successive waves of anti-government protests. Party leaders have repeatedly pointed to the compensation pledge as evidence that engagement with President Ruto was delivering tangible benefits for their supporters.
Behind the scenes, the State House event reportedly triggered a stormy discussion among ODM’s top leadership. Senior party officials questioned why key figures, including governors and senior party office holders, were absent from a ceremony involving one of the most politically significant items in the UDA-ODM agreement.
The concerns go beyond protocol.
Some ODM insiders now believe there is a deliberate attempt by UDA strategists to claim sole ownership of a programme that was negotiated jointly between the two parties. The fear within sections of ODM is that if compensation payments begin reaching beneficiaries without visible ODM involvement, President Ruto could reap the political rewards among communities that have traditionally supported Raila Odinga.
That perception has become particularly sensitive as political conversations increasingly shift toward the 2027 General Election. ODM has invested significant political capital in persuading sceptical supporters that cooperation with Ruto’s administration would yield justice for victims of police excesses and political violence.
The compensation programme itself is extensive. Beneficiaries have been identified across six categories of violations, including deaths, enforced disappearances, torture, sexual violence, unlawful detention and destruction of property. According to government figures, the largest group consists of victims whose freedom and security were violated during demonstrations and related security operations.
President Ruto has framed the initiative as a national healing process aimed at ending a cycle in which protests repeatedly descend into violence, loss of life and destruction of property. He argues that compensating victims is necessary to strengthen democracy and restore public confidence in state institutions.
Yet the politics surrounding the payout may prove more complicated than the compensation exercise itself.
The public protest by Oburu Oginga has revealed underlying tensions that have largely remained hidden since the UDA-ODM pact was signed. While neither side has openly questioned the future of the alliance, the dispute has exposed competing interests over credit, influence and political ownership of flagship programmes.
With billions of shillings now set to flow to victims across the country, the compensation exercise is emerging as more than a human rights intervention. It is becoming an early test of whether the fragile UDA-ODM partnership can survive the political pressures that come with sharing power and claiming achievements.
If the disagreement deepens, the Sh2 billion compensation programme could become the issue that transforms quiet unease within the coalition into a full-blown political confrontation.
Embattled ODM Secretary-General Edwin Sifuna has been removed from the Senate Energy Committee, chaired by ODM leader Oburu Oginga.
The Nairobi Senator has been replaced by Homa Bay Senator Moses Kajwang’ in the reshuffle effected on Wednesday.
The move means Sifuna will no longer serve on the committee chaired by Oburu, who is also the Siaya Senator.
Oburu and Sifuna have had infighting over the running of the ODM party and the decision to enter into a coalition agreement with President William Ruto’s UDA.
In the changes, Garissa Senator Abdul Haji replaced nominated Senator Beatrice Ogolla in the Energy Committee, while Machakos Senator Agnes Kavindu was nominated to the Senate Information, Communication and Technology Committee, also replacing Ogolla.
Ogolla, in turn, replaced Kajwang in the Senate Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries Committee.
Unlike the other senators affected by the reshuffle, Sifuna was not reassigned to another committee, leaving him with membership in only two committees — the Senate County Public Accounts Committee chaired by Kajwang’ and the Senate National Security, Intelligence and Foreign Relations Committee chaired by Isiolo Senator Fatuma Dullo.
Announcing the changes, Senate Majority Leader Cheruiyot cited provisions of the Senate Standing Orders and a recommendation by the Senate Business Committee.
“Notwithstanding the resolution of the Senate made on February 12, 2025, on the approval of senators to serve in various standing committees of the Senate and pursuant to Standing Orders 197, 199, 228 and the Fourth Schedule to the Standing Orders, the Senate has approved the following senators nominated by the Senate Business Committee to serve in various committees,” said Cheruiyot.
Sifuna’s removal comes against the backdrop of an increasingly public fallout with Oburu.
Earlier this year, the Nairobi Senator openly declared that he was unwilling to serve under Oburu’s leadership of ODM following his elevation as party leader after Raila Odinga’s exit from the position.
Sifuna has been one of the most vocal members of the Energy Committee and was among senators who aggressively questioned the controversial Adani Group proposal involving the expansion of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport before the government eventually terminated the deal.
The committee changes come amid widening divisions within ODM.
Sifuna is associated with the party’s Linda Mwananchi faction, while Oburu is seen as a key figure in the Linda Ground camp. The two factions have increasingly differed over the party’s relationship with President William Ruto’s administration.
While Sifuna’s allies have maintained a hardline opposition stance and continue to criticise the broad-based arrangement between ODM and Kenya Kwanza, the Oburu camp has been viewed as supportive of continued engagement with the government.
The differences were laid bare in March when Sifuna launched a scathing attack on sections of the party leadership.
“I refuse to be the SG of mediocrity. I refuse to be the SG of Oburu Oginga. These characters do not deserve me. Let them ask for a proper NDC where we shall present candidates for all the party positions,” he said.
Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga has defended her county government’s expenditure of approximately Sh500,000 on the construction of a two-door pit latrine, telling senators that the amount reflects standard costs associated with such projects in parts of the county.
The issue emerged during a session of the Senate Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on Tuesday as the governor responded to audit queries touching on county expenditure and pending bills.
The cost of the sanitation facility drew scrutiny from lawmakers, particularly after Nairobi Senator Edwin Sifuna questioned whether taxpayers had received value for money.
Responding to the concerns, Wanga maintained that the figure was neither unusual nor inflated.
“The standard cost is about half a million shillings. That covers excavation and construction,” she told the committee.
According to the governor, the final cost can vary depending on the terrain and site conditions, with some projects costing slightly less. She said difficult ground conditions in certain areas of Homa Bay can significantly increase excavation expenses.
The explanation, however, quickly sparked debate both inside and outside the Senate chamber, with many Kenyans questioning how a basic pit latrine could attract such a substantial price tag at a time when counties are facing growing financial pressures.
The matter arose against the backdrop of broader audit concerns facing the county government, including questions surrounding pending bills reportedly running into billions of shillings.
While construction costs often vary depending on location, design specifications, labour charges, materials and geological conditions, the Sh500,000 figure has generated intense public discussion, particularly on social media, where users compared it with the cost of similar facilities built in schools, health centres and rural communities across the country.
The Senate committee sought further clarification on procurement procedures, project specifications and whether the expenditure represented value for money.
The debate highlights a recurring challenge in county governments across Kenya, where questions over project costs frequently trigger concerns about efficiency, procurement practices and prudent use of public resources.
For critics, the issue is not simply the cost of a toilet but whether public funds are being spent effectively amid competing demands in sectors such as healthcare, education, water and agriculture.
Supporters of the county administration, on the other hand, argue that infrastructure costs cannot be assessed in isolation without considering site-specific factors, engineering requirements and compliance with public construction standards.
The Auditor-General’s findings and the Senate committee’s review are expected to provide further clarity on whether the expenditure was justified and whether the county obtained value for the money spent.
As scrutiny of county spending intensifies, the Sh500,000 latrine has become the latest symbol in the ongoing national debate over accountability, transparency and the management of devolved funds.
When Kenya Commercial Bank Group quietly released its 2025 sustainability report this month, burying the figure inside a paragraph about disciplinary processes, it disclosed something that deserved a front page. Sixty employees across KCB’s East African operations had been dismissed in the year to December 2025 for their involvement in insider fraud schemes targeting both the institution and its customers. The figure was almost double the 34 dismissed the year before, itself triple the 11 exits recorded in 2023. Three years. Three escalating purges. An institution that holds more customer deposits than any other bank in the region and describes itself as Kenya’s financial backbone, quietly bleeding from within.
The bank’s public language, as always, is disciplined. Zero tolerance. Enhanced controls. Biometric authentication. AI-driven monitoring. What the glossy sustainability report does not say is that over a period spanning nearly a decade, KCB has dismissed well over 250 employees for fraud-related conduct and that court records, DCI files, and published investigative findings reveal a pattern of schemes that range from brazen vault robbery to sophisticated digital forgery. Nor does it say what regulators, investigators, and compliance professionals who have watched the Kenyan banking sector for years say privately: that firing the caught is the easy part, and that the structural conditions producing these people have never been seriously addressed.
A DECADE OF SACKINGS — THE NUMBERS KCB WOULD RATHER YOU DID NOT ADD UP
Start at the beginning. In 2014, KCB dismissed approximately 90 employees for fraud-related conduct a figure that attracted industry-wide attention at the time and led to public commitments about tightened controls. The numbers fell in subsequent years: 33 sacked in 2015, 31 in 2016, 34 in 2017. Then they fell again to 13 in 2019, 10 in 2020. For a brief period, the trend appeared to support the bank’s narrative of maturing systems and a retreating internal threat. Then the trajectory reversed, sharply. Eight in 2022. Twenty-two in 2023, a 175 percent surge from the prior year. Thirty-four in 2024. And now sixty in 2025 the highest annual total in at least a decade.
Over the five years between 2021 and 2025 alone, the cumulative count approaches 130 dismissed employees. Add in the years before that and the total dismissed for fraud across KCB’s recorded sustainability reporting runs well past 250 individuals.
These are not hypothetical risk events. They are confirmed, disciplinary-processed, employment-terminated human beings, each representing at minimum a completed scheme, an exposed vulnerability, and a customer whose funds or trust was placed in danger.
“KCB has dismissed well over 250 employees for fraud-related conduct across the past decade. The bank describes each purge as evidence of zero tolerance. What it cannot explain is why the purges keep getting bigger.”
The bank’s own reported fraud incident volumes tell a parallel story. In 2020, KCB recorded 894 internal fraud attempts nearly double the 574 of the previous year across a total of 1,213 fraud events on its systems. By 2023, blocked fraud attempts numbered 249 and the value at risk stood at Sh362.7 million. In 2024, 339 attempts valued at Sh212.9 million were thwarted. The 2025 figure shows 201 recorded incidents and Sh141.1 million in blocked losses down in absolute volume but sharply up in human cost, with 60 dismissals to show for a lower case count. The inference is unavoidable: the bank is catching more of its own people per incident, not because the schemes are becoming less frequent, but because they are becoming more identifiable by category which means they are also becoming more systematic.
THE COURT RECORD: WHAT KCB’S SUSTAINABILITY REPORTS LEAVE OUT
The sustainability reports are sanitised by design. Court records are not. To understand what KCB’s insider fraud actually looks like in practice, you have to go to the DCI press releases, the Milimani Commercial Court cause lists, and the Employment and Labour Relations Court judgments that rarely make the headlines.
In August 2018, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations arrested four KCB employees Benson Mwai Karugu, Edmund Kirturi Mutua, Evans Kenda Kiplagat, and Macdonald Mochama Mongwe — on charges of stealing Sh72,619,951 from the bank. The method was instructive. The four had registered 37 fictitious merchant companies with KCB, submitted fraudulent point-of-sale card transaction claims through those companies, approved those same claims in their capacity as bank employees, received the settlements in the companies’ accounts, and then distributed the proceeds via M-Pesa. Each layer of the scheme required internal access: the ability to register merchant companies, the authority to approve POS claims, and knowledge of how to structure the transfers to avoid triggering early alerts. This was not opportunism. It was a constructed system, built by insiders, using institutional infrastructure.
The same year 2018 two KCB employees in Wundanyi were arrested and held at the divisional police station after Sh20.6 million disappeared from the branch’s strong room in a single week. The two suspects were the custodians of the keys to the strong room. When the bank manager was informed the safe was inaccessible, a technician was dispatched from Mombasa. When the strong room was finally broken open, the money was gone. The police, in their own words, described it as an inside job from the outset.
In November 2017, before either of those cases, KCB had already been the subject of what remains one of the most audacious bank robberies in Kenyan history the Thika tunnel heist. Three men, two of them engineering graduates from Jomo Kenyatta University, set up a bookshop in the Thika City Friendly Stalls directly adjacent to the KCB branch on Kenyatta Highway. Over several months, they dug a 30-metre-long, 10-metre-deep tunnel from the bookshop into the bank’s strong room, directly opposite the Thika police station. When they were done, they walked out with Sh52.65 million in cash and foreign currency. Part of the loot Sh17.1 million was recovered at a house in Juja. Police have maintained that the precision of the entry, the knowledge of the strong room’s precise location, and the operational silence that surrounded the dig for months point to intelligence gathered from inside. Two suspects described as the masterminds were never apprehended.
“The precision of the Thika tunnel, the structure of the Sh72 million POS scheme, the Wundanyi vault disappearance — each scheme required something only an insider could provide: institutional knowledge.”
THE SECTOR BENEATH KCB: A SYSTEMIC ROT
KCB does not sit alone in this. It sits at the top of a sector-wide crisis that Kenya’s banking establishment has spent years managing rather than confronting. The Central Bank of Kenya’s own data makes uncomfortable reading. Fraud cases across the banking sector more than doubled in 2024, rising from 173 to 353 reported incidents. Losses nearly quadrupled, from Sh412 million in 2023 to Sh1.59 billion in 2024. Mobile banking fraud alone surged by 344 percent, with Sh810.68 million siphoned through digital channels more than half the sector’s total losses. The Communications Authority of Kenya reported 7.96 billion cyber threats in the twelve months to June 2025, more than double the year before. The CBK has warned in formal published language that successful attacks could push some banks below the statutory minimum capital threshold.
But the headline cyber-threat framing obscures what investigators and compliance professionals say is the real driver: the insider. Techcabal’s reporting in September 2025 cited a Banking Fraud Investigations Unit officer who said bluntly that most fund losses are inside jobs, and that the CBK’s loss figure of Sh1.59 billion was itself an understatement, given that most victims never report out of embarrassment or distrust of the system. That same officer described a typical scheme as multi-layered: phishing text as the initial hook, bank teller as the data-passing intermediary, mobile money as the laundry mechanism, and, in some cases, law enforcement contacts as the protection layer. “Each stage blurs the line between cyberattack, insider theft, and organised racketeering,” the report noted.
Equity Bank’s experience in 2024 illustrated precisely how catastrophic the insider dimension can become. David Muchiri Kimani, a manager at Equity’s Group Processing Centre in the Salary Processing Unit, used his IT system credentials to process over 40 transactions totalling Sh1,499,465,831 just under Sh1.5 billion transferring the payroll funds to rival banks before the theft was detected. Investigators arrested Kimani and his father, Joseph Kimani Machiri, alleging the pair had colluded to set up business accounts to receive the transferred funds.
This single event a manager on leave, using his still-active credentials, targeting the payroll cycle triggered the most dramatic governance response in Kenyan banking history.
Equity CEO James Mwangi launched a sweeping ethics audit across all 14,000 staff. By May 2025, the bank had issued show-cause notices to 1,200 employees in a single wave, citing suspicious inflows into their personal bank accounts and M-Pesa wallets from customers and linked entities.
Termination letters described the conduct as “gross misconduct” and “acts contrary to the Group’s code of conduct.” Mwangi was uncharacteristically blunt: “It doesn’t matter how many I will lose. I don’t even care. I will clean the bank and I will be ruthless. This is not a toll station.”
The Equity purge, the CBK figures, the KCB escalation they form a coherent picture. Between 2018 and 2024, Equity’s Ugandan subsidiary alone was engulfed in a scheme involving UGX 65 billion in unsecured loans disbursed through the Eazzy Stock digital lending platform, with employees channelling funds to fictitious companies, unqualified relatives, and ghost borrowers.
Safaricom dismissed 113 employees in its fiscal year to March 2024 the highest in recent company history for fraud offences including SIM swap facilitation, identity theft, and asset misuse. Absa Kenya disclosed it blocked Sh306 million in fraud attempts during 2024 while absorbing Sh169 million in actual losses. Standard Chartered Kenya, having deployed ThreatMetrix and automated detection systems, still cited “mobile, cards, and internet banking external fraud events” as its most significant financial crime exposure for the year.
THE STRUCTURAL PROBLEM NOBODY IN NAIROBI’S BANKING HALLS WILL NAME
There is a question that none of KCB’s sustainability reports, none of Equity’s press releases, and none of the CBK’s formal publications answer directly: why do banks keep hiring the people who then defraud them, and why, when those people are dismissed, do they find employment at the next institution down the road?
The answer is structural, and it has been sitting in plain sight for years. Kenya’s commercial banks have no shared staff blacklist. There is no industry-wide mechanism by which a KCB employee dismissed for orchestrating a POS settlement scheme in 2018 is flagged before being hired as a credit officer at a microfinance institution in 2019 or a tier-two bank in 2021. The Business Daily has reported this gap explicitly: “Commercial banks do not have a staff database to tag employees who are fired due to ethical issues, which has seen fraudulent persons remain in the industry.” This is not an oversight. It is a design failure, one that the Kenya Bankers Association and the CBK have acknowledged in general terms without resolving in specific ones.
The incentive structure inside branches compounds the structural gap. KCB, like every large commercial bank in Kenya, runs performance targets tied to deposits mobilised, loans disbursed, and accounts opened. Branch managers and relationship officers live and die by quarterly scorecards. The same pressure that produces growth also produces the tolerance for ethical compromise that is the precondition of the kickback culture. A customer services officer who facilitates a loan for a shell company in exchange for a cut is not operating in a vacuum. They are operating inside an institution where the incentive to process is always louder than the incentive to question.
The digital transition has not neutralised this dynamic. It has amplified it. As Equity’s CEO noted after the Sh1.5 billion payroll theft: “We pushed digital. We moved 98 percent of transactions online. And then we discovered that the person sitting in front of the terminal is still human.” KCB’s own fraud numbers confirm the shift in attack surface. The POS manipulation of 2018 required physical branch presence. The credential abuse at SBM Bank — where an IT officer left her workstation unlocked and remotely accessible, allowing malware to be planted across multiple machines before Sh9.5 million was drained through the Mfukoni mobile channel required only a moment of negligence and an external co-conspirator. The methods evolve. The insider advantage remains the constant.
“Kenya’s banks have no shared blacklist. An employee dismissed from KCB for a POS scheme can walk into a tier-two bank the following year. The CBK has acknowledged the gap. Nobody has closed it.”
WHAT KCB’S OWN NUMBERS ACTUALLY SAY ABOUT THE FUTURE
Read KCB’s 2025 sustainability report carefully and the numbers reveal a paradox the bank has not publicly addressed. Actual losses written off in 2025 fell sharply: just Sh760,000 against Sh4.5 million the year before. Blocked fraud value also fell, from Sh212.9 million in 2024 to Sh141.1 million in 2025. On the surface, these are the numbers of a bank that is winning. But 60 people were dismissed to produce those numbers more than in any recent year. The number of fraud incidents fell from 339 to 201, yet the number of people caught and removed nearly doubled.
There are two possible readings of that combination. The optimistic reading is that detection has improved so dramatically that the bank is catching its insiders earlier, before they execute full schemes, which is why the value of losses and blocked attempts is lower even as the dismissal count is higher. The pessimistic reading and the one that the bank’s longer history supports is that the actual population of compromised insiders is larger than the dismissed cohort suggests, and that the apparent reduction in fraud volume reflects a shift in tactics rather than a reduction in intent. Smaller, faster, harder-to-detect schemes produce fewer flagged incidents and lower blocked values, but require more insiders to execute at scale.
The geographic concentration reinforces the concern. Of 60 dismissed in 2025, 50 were based in Kenya and 10 in Rwanda. Of 201 fraud incidents, 188 occurred in Kenya. KCB’s other subsidiaries Uganda, Burundi, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo reported no fraud attempts at all. That is not because those environments are cleaner. It is because the reporting, the detection infrastructure, and the disciplinary culture are less developed. The fraud that appears in the Kenya numbers is the fraud that has been found. The fraud that does not appear in the other country numbers is not necessarily absent.
CONCLUSION: ZERO TOLERANCE IS NOT ENOUGH
KCB Group has Kenya’s largest customer base, the most ATMs, the widest branch network, and the deepest penetration into the country’s payroll, government agency, and retail deposit ecosystem. It is not a peripheral institution. It is the financial infrastructure. When 60 of its employees in a single year are confirmed to have exploited that infrastructure for personal gain, the question is not whether KCB has a fraud problem. The question is whether the problem is being managed or being solved.
The evidence accumulated across a decade points firmly toward managed. Sustainability reports are published. Ethics training completion rates are disclosed. Termination figures are shared in the same paragraph as blocked fraud values and biometric authentication rollouts. The framing is always of a bank in control of a challenge, not a bank being overtaken by one. But the challenged institution is the same one that lost Sh52 million through a tunnel dug opposite a police station. The same one whose employees constructed 37 phantom companies to siphon Sh72 million through POS settlements. The same one whose Wundanyi strong room was looted by the two people who held the keys to it.
The CBK, for its part, has deployed the language of concern fraud cases doubled, losses quadrupled, capital adequacy at risk without deploying the structural remedy that would make the most difference: mandatory cross-bank disclosure of fraud-related terminations, enforceable integrity screening before hire, and a published, real-time registry of employees dismissed for financial crime. Eleven banks were fined by the CBK in 2024 for exceeding insider lending limits, echoing the same governance failures that destroyed Imperial Bank a decade ago. The regulator fined them. It did not name them publicly. That is the template: consequence without accountability, sanction without deterrence.
KCB’s 60 dismissals in 2025 are not a sign of failure. Detection is better than it was. But detection without prevention is a treadmill. The bank and its regulator have been running on it for ten years. The belt is moving faster. The people on it are not.
NAIROBI — Pressure is mounting on investigative agencies to examine claims linking Garissa Woman Representative Amina Edo Udgoon Siyad to a series of disputed land and procurement-related transactions that have emerged alongside the wider controversy surrounding the leasing of Nzoia Sugar Company.
The growing demands, amplified through the hashtag #NzoiaSugarLeaseScandal, come as questions continue to be raised about transparency, ownership structures, tender processes and the management of public assets connected to Kenya’s sugar sector reforms.
At the center of the controversy are allegations circulating on social media and in documents shared online claiming that companies associated with individuals linked to the legislator may have benefited from decisions made within the Ministry of Agriculture and related agencies.
Critics are calling for a comprehensive investigation by the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations, the Registrar of Companies and other oversight bodies.
The allegations remain unproven and no court has made findings against the Garissa Woman Representative. Neither has any law enforcement agency publicly announced a criminal investigation into her conduct at the time of publication.
The controversy gained momentum after documents surfaced online purporting to show proceedings before the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board involving agricultural ministry entities and private firms.
Additional company registration records circulating online have fueled speculation about ownership structures and possible links between politically exposed individuals and companies involved in land-related transactions.
Social media users have particularly focused on claims that a company allegedly connected to relatives or associates of the legislator secured favorable treatment during administrative and procurement processes. Some posts further allege that senior government officials may have been influenced in ways that require independent scrutiny.
Those claims have not been independently verified and remain allegations.
The renewed attention comes against the backdrop of the contentious leasing of Nzoia Sugar Company to West Kenya Sugar Company under a 30-year arrangement approved by the government as part of efforts to revive struggling state-owned sugar mills.
The deal has generated intense political and public debate since it was announced in 2025. Critics have questioned the transparency of the leasing process, while supporters argue the arrangement was necessary to rescue a company burdened by debt and years of operational decline.
The controversy deepened after Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu raised concerns regarding documentation surrounding the lease.
In a report tabled before Parliament, the Auditor-General stated that her office had not been provided with certain key records, including a formal handover document and asset valuation reports, making it difficult to fully confirm the regularity of the leasing process.
Those findings reignited concerns among critics who have long argued that public assets in the sugar sector are vulnerable to opaque transactions and political influence.
While the allegations against Edo Udgoon Siyad have largely been driven by online activism and unofficial document leaks, governance experts say the claims warrant proper verification rather than dismissal or unquestioning acceptance.
Anti-corruption campaigners argue that any allegations involving elected leaders, public officials and entities seeking government contracts should be subjected to forensic examination. They are calling for investigators to review company ownership records, correspondence between public officials, procurement documentation, land registry records and any transactions connected to the disputed deals.
The Garissa Woman Representative has built her political profile around advocacy for women, youth empowerment and development initiatives in northern Kenya. Supporters say she is being unfairly targeted through unverified online campaigns and insist any accusations should be tested through lawful investigations rather than social media trials.
Nevertheless, the controversy has continued to grow as activists and political commentators demand greater transparency over dealings involving public resources.
The broader Nzoia Sugar debate has become symbolic of larger national concerns about accountability, privatization and the management of strategic public assets. While courts have previously cleared the way for the Nzoia lease to proceed and government officials have defended the arrangement as a necessary economic intervention, questions about governance and oversight have persisted.
As calls for investigations intensify, attention is now shifting to whether anti-corruption agencies will formally examine the allegations surrounding the companies and individuals named in the online claims.
Until such investigations are conducted and findings made public, the accusations against Edo Udgoon Siyad remain allegations. However, the growing public pressure underscores the demand for transparency and accountability in all transactions involving public assets, land allocations and government-linked procurement processes.
Nairobi — While Kenyans were still digesting the announcement that China Communications Construction Company (CCCC) had walked away with the Sh375.4 billion ($2.9 billion) tender to rebuild Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, a quieter and far more troubling detail was buried in the fine print of the deal: a convicted Zimbabwean fraudster, fresh from a stint in Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison, has been slotted in as a joint venture partner on one of the largest infrastructure contracts in this country’s history.
His name is Wicknell Munodaani Chivayo. To his fan base on social media he is “Sir Wicknell,” a self-anointed philanthropist who showers musicians, footballers and soldiers with Mercedes-Benzes and bundles of cash.
To investigators in Harare, Pretoria and now, increasingly, Nairobi, he is something else entirely: the face of a tendering machine that has turned proximity to presidents into hard currency, leaving a trail of stalled projects, inflated invoices and unanswered questions stretching from Gwanda to Gairezi, from Johannesburg to JKIA’s tarmac.
A TENDER BORN FROM RUINS
The story of how Chivayo landed in this deal cannot be told without first understanding what it replaced. JKIA is buckling under its own success or failure, depending on how one looks at it. Designed for eight million passengers a year, the airport now processes approximately 8.8 million travellers, producing the congestion, delays and indignities that have become a grim rite of passage for anyone flying through Nairobi.
The first serious attempt at a fix collapsed spectacularly. India’s Adani Group had been lined up for a USD1.85 billion investment package that would have granted the conglomerate a 30-year operational concession in exchange for modernising the airport.
That deal died in 2024 after fierce resistance from Kenyan labour unions over terms they considered hostile to the national interest, compounded by a corruption probe into Adani in the United States.
Out of that wreckage emerged a new, state-funded model. Kenya would seed a National Infrastructure Fund using proceeds from the privatisation of the Kenya Pipeline Company, and use that, plus local and Chinese bank financing, to fund the new build directly.
The contract, now valued at KSh 375.4 billion (US$2.9 billion), was awarded to China Communications Construction Company, with execution handled through its subsidiary China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC) the firm behind the Standard Gauge Railway, the Nairobi Expressway and the Talanta Stadium. The project is expected to transform JKIA into a hub capable of handling significantly higher passenger traffic over the coming decades, with a new terminal designed for 15 million annual passengers and a runway expansion that will more than quadruple aircraft movement capacity.
Officially, that is the entire story: a competitive tender, won by a Chinese state contractor, financed through a sovereign infrastructure fund. Nowhere in the government’s public messaging does the name Chivayo appear.
ENTER “SIR WICKNELL”
And yet, according to reporting by ZimLive, citing two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement, CCCC brought in its subsidiary CRBC and IMC Construction Kenya wholly owned by Chivayo as joint venture partners on the project.
The precise structure of that arrangement whether Chivayo’s firm holds equity, a subcontracting slice, or some other form of participation has not been disclosed by either CCCC or the Kenyan government. What is beyond dispute is that a 45-year-old businessman whose principal track record lies in Zimbabwean energy tenders, ICT deals and a stint as an alleged election-materials middleman, has somehow secured a foothold in a project that Kenyan taxpayers are bankrolling to the tune of Sh168 billion ($1.3 billion) through the National Infrastructure Fund.
How does a man with no demonstrated history in airport construction end up as a named partner on Africa’s most consequential aviation project of the decade? The honest answer is that nobody outside the deal’s architects knows for certain. But the pattern of Chivayo’s career offers a depressingly familiar template, and it begins not with engineering credentials, but with a prison sentence.
THE CONVICT IN THE BOARDROOM
In 2004, Chivayo was convicted of theft by false pretences in a foreign currency scam and sentenced to three years at Chikurubi Maximum Security Prison, Zimbabwe’s most notorious penitentiary. He served roughly a year to eighteen months before release. Court records from the period describe a straightforward con: Chivayo took money for a transaction and never delivered.
That conviction did not end his career. If anything, it appears to have been the opening chapter of a playbook he has refined ever since secure government-linked contracts, collect advance payments, and let delivery become an afterthought.
His company Intratrek Zimbabwe was awarded a US$200 million tender for the Gwanda Solar Project in 2015, but no meaningful progress has been made on the project despite an advance payment of US$5 million from the Zimbabwe Power Company. That is roughly Sh646 million of public money advanced for a solar plant that, a decade later, remains largely a hole in the ground. Chivayo faced repeated rounds of criminal prosecution over that advance payment and was only acquitted in 2024 nine years after the money disappeared into his accounts.
In 2011, he was arrested on eight counts of fraud and money laundering and had five vehicles confiscated by the state. He was acquitted on all counts. The acquittals have become part of his defenders’ case that he is a persecuted entrepreneur. His critics see something else: a man whose closeness to power consistently outpaces the ability of Zimbabwe’s justice system to hold him to account.
THE Sh17 BILLION ELECTION SCANDAL KENYANS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT
If there is one scandal that should worry Kenyans most given that Kenya heads into a general election in 2027 it is the one involving Zimbabwe’s electoral commission.
In 2024, leaked WhatsApp audio recordings surfaced in which a voice attributed to Chivayo discussed how proceeds from a US$100 million contract for the supply of election materials to the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission ahead of the 2023 elections were being distributed.
The recordings were leaked by Moses Mpofu and Mike Chimombe, men who claimed to have been Chivayo’s partners in the deal and said they had been cut out of their share.
The mechanics of the scheme, as reconstructed by South African investigators and reporters, are staggering. South Africa’s Financial Intelligence Centre found that Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Finance paid over R1.1 billion (approximately US$61 million) to the Johannesburg printing firm Ren-Form CC for election materials, of which roughly R800 million was subsequently transferred to companies owned by Chivayo, including Intratrek Holdings and Dolintel Trading Enterprise. In rand terms, that is over Sh17 billion routed to a single businessman’s companies for what was ostensibly a government stationery and ballot-paper contract.
The inflation involved would be comic if it were not paid for with public money. A central server valued at roughly R90,000 was billed at R23 million. Non-flushing toilets were invoiced at R68,700 each — nearly seven times retail cost. Biometric voter registration kits initially quoted at US$5,000 ballooned to US$16,000 by the time the invoice reached Zimbabwe’s treasury. That is a markup structure that should set alarm bells ringing in any procurement office on the continent including, Kenyan voters might reasonably ask, any office handling election technology ahead of 2027.
South Africa’s FIC also flagged R36.5 million in payments from Chivayo’s Standard Bank account between January 2023 and September 2024 that appeared to be payments towards car purchases a detail that dovetails neatly with his very public habit of gifting luxury vehicles to musicians, football administrators and security services back home.
Chivayo’s response to all of this has been consistent: deny, deflect, apologise for the “impression” created rather than the conduct itself. He apologised to President Mnangagwa, the former CIO director-general, the cabinet secretary and the ZEC chairperson but notably did not deny that payments were made, only expressed regret for creating the impression that state institutions were complicit.
Zimbabwe’s own Anti-Corruption Commission announced in December 2025 that it found no evidence directly linking Chivayo to the ZEC transaction even as South Africa’s Hawks kept their parallel money-laundering investigation open.
For Kenyans now watching this man take a seat at the table on a Sh375 billion airport contract, the relevant question is not whether he was ever convicted in the ZEC matter. It is whether a country preparing for a contested 2027 election should be comfortable with a figure carrying this baggage operating inside its borders with this level of access to the presidency particularly given his documented history with election-related contracts and the opposition’s pointed references to election technology procurement.
THE MNANGAGWA PLAYBOOK, EXPORTED TO NAIROBI
Chivayo’s rise in Zimbabwe was built on one foundation above all others: a relationship with President Emmerson Mnangagwa so close that, in leaked audio, Chivayo reportedly boasted the president calls him “my son” a claim that forced Mnangagwa’s spokesperson into the awkward position of publicly condemning “name-dropping” by his own ally.
He is known for his close public association with President Mnangagwa and ZANU-PF, and his social media has long served as a running exhibition of handshakes, state banquets and motorcade photographs.
What is happening in Kenya now looks like the same playbook, transplanted.
Chivayo visited Kenya’s State House in January 2026, meeting President Ruto and Deputy President Kithure Kindiki at Sagana State Lodge, and was photographed with Ruto and Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan at State House in Nairobi in 2025.
On June 1, 2026 the day after Ruto led Madaraka Day celebrations Chivayo appeared again at the newly built Wajir State Lodge, where he described Ruto as “one of Africa’s most accomplished and visionary leaders” and revealed he was in talks with the president over an unspecified multimillion-dollar investment project.
Wicknell with President Ruto at State House, Nairobi.
The Kenyan dimension escalated dramatically in February 2026, when Chivayo was granted a Kenyan passport, a decision made public by activist and presidential aspirant Boniface Mwangi, who published a list of foreign nationals who had received Kenyan citizenship. Former Cabinet Secretary Justin Muturi, reacting to Chivayo’s January State House visit, asked pointedly: “Whenever he comes to Kenya, he passes through Eldoret. What is the President doing with him?” Muturi went further still, displaying photographs he claimed showed Chivayo inside the president’s office and in meetings with regional leaders, and arguing that the businessman’s political connections shield him from accountability.
A Harare-based human rights defender, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the relationship bluntly: “Nothing for the people but just another looting spree sanitised by presidential immunity.” Muturi has accused Ruto of associating with foreign individuals linked to disputed elections across Africa, and believes Kenyans must question who gains access to State House as the country edges closer to the 2027 General Election.
It is worth pausing on the optics here. This is a man who, by his own account in earlier interviews, describes his main business as “government tenders secured with foreign partners in the areas of renewable energy, engineering, procurement, construction and power projects” a CV with no airport construction experience whatsoever, and a private jet that gives him VIP access to JKIA’s own tarmac.
THE LIFESTYLE: JETS, GULFSTREAMS AND A HELICOPTER FLEET WHILE QUESTIONS GO UNANSWERED
Even as the FIC’s R800 million findings circulated and South African Hawks investigators kept their files open, Chivayo’s public displays of wealth have only accelerated a pattern critics describe as deliberate, designed to project invincibility and outpace scrutiny with spectacle.
In mid-2025, Chivayo unveiled a US$79 million Gulfstream G700 private jet roughly Sh10.2 billion at current exchange rates, and among the most expensive private aircraft in the world.
Less than a year later, in January 2026, he was at it again: Chivayo splashed out about US$34 million roughly Sh4.4 billion on a long-range Gulfstream G550, a jet powered by twin Rolls-Royce engines with an intercontinental range of approximately 12,500 kilometres, capable of flying non-stop from Harare to London, Paris, Milan or Singapore.
Wicknell Chivayo’s Gulfstream G550, a US$79million ultra long range private jet
He took delivery of that aircraft in early June 2026 even as he remained embroiled in high-profile legal disputes in Zimbabwe and South Africa, including a bitter divorce battle with his estranged wife Sonja Madzikanda.
Before the G550 arrived, he had been flying around the region in a Bombardier Challenger 300, and he separately acquired an AW139 helicopter.
His Facebook announcement of the G550 purchase was vintage Chivayo: a mixture of English and Shona, heavy on religious gratitude, and capped with the declaration that he was living the “life of the rich and famous,” adding for emphasis that he was “the boss” and did not deal in lies.
The giving has been just as theatrical as the spending. In 2025 alone, Chivayo gave a luxury vehicle to broadcaster Reuben Barwe, a Range Rover Autobiography and US$150,000 in cash to musician Jah Prayzah, vehicles worth R7.2 million to Zimbabwe Football Association president Nqobile Magwizi across two occasions, R10.4 million and a bus to Highlanders FC ahead of the 2026 season, and twenty luxury vehicles plus US$2 million to Zimbabwe’s defence forces, police and prisons service in December 2025.
That last gift is particularly striking: a man convicted of fraud and once imprisoned by the state is now bankrolling the very security services that enforce that state’s authority.
Converted to Kenyan shillings, the scale becomes even starker. The Gulfstream G700 alone Sh10.2 billion could fund several rural hospital upgrades. The combined value of the two jets, the helicopter and the gifting sprees documented above runs comfortably into the tens of billions of shillings, accumulated by a man whose flagship project at home, the Gwanda solar plant, remains unbuilt eleven years after the first cheque was cashed.
THE CHINESE PARTNER: HARDLY A CLEAN PAIR OF HANDS
If Chivayo’s presence in the JKIA deal raises one set of red flags, his Chinese partner raises another and Kenya has direct, recent, painful experience of it.
The World Bank debarred CRBC, CCCC’s predecessor entity, in 2009 for fraudulent activity related to collusive bidding on World Bank-funded road projects in the Philippines. CCCC has long argued that this debarment is irrelevant to non-World-Bank-funded projects, a defence it deployed when Kenyan civil society challenged its eligibility for the Sh40 billion Kipevu Oil Terminal tender at the Port of Mombasa back in 2019.
More damaging still is what happened on Kenyan soil far more recently.
In August 2024, Kenya’s Tax Appeals Tribunal upheld a Kenya Revenue Authority assessment ordering CCCC to pay over Sh1.047 billion for running a “missing trader” tax evasion scheme a scheme in which CCCC claimed inflated input VAT for purchases that had not been incurred, using fictitious invoices from shell companies with no known physical addresses.
Investigators found that some of the “directors” of these shell firms had left Kenya years before the invoices were issued, and that one of the implicated companies had already been struck off the companies registry.
The scale of CCCC’s offshore manoeuvring in Kenya goes well beyond that single VAT case. A Kenya Revenue Authority investigation, reported by ICIJ, found that CCCC paid more than $205 million to a Mauritius-based entity called Afrigo Development and related companies in what tax authorities described as “sham or circuitous transactions” and “fictional” imports companies that had no physical presence in Mauritius beyond a mailing address, and which were paid for vaguely defined “royalties” and “studies” on tunnels and concrete.
C4ADS has separately documented that the KRA recovered Sh1.05 billion (US$8 million) in evaded taxes from CCCC in August 2024 following its audit of the company’s tax evasion scheme.
This, then, is the consortium now entrusted with Sh375 billion of Kenyan infrastructure spending: a Chinese state contractor with a documented World Bank fraud debarment and a freshly-litigated billion-shilling tax evasion judgment against it in Kenya, joined at the hip to a Zimbabwean businessman trailing an unresolved Sh17 billion election-funds scandal and a fraud conviction of his own.
Individually, either partner would warrant the closest scrutiny from Kenya’s procurement watchdogs. Together, in an opaque joint venture whose terms have not been published, they represent something close to a due-diligence nightmare.
WHAT KENYANS DESERVE TO KNOW
None of this proves wrongdoing in the specific case of the JKIA contract. The terms of IMC Construction Kenya’s participation have not been published. The tender evaluation that led to CCCC’s selection and the question of whether Chivayo’s involvement was disclosed during that process, as procurement law would require has not been made public either.
But the pattern is the pattern. A businessman with a fraud conviction builds proximity to a head of state through gifts, flattery and constant visibility. That proximity is monetised through government-linked contracts.
Delivery on those contracts becomes optional. Public funds move through shell companies and inflated invoices. And the wealth generated is recycled into private jets, helicopters and high-profile philanthropy that launders reputation as effectively as any shell company launders money.
Kenyan taxpayers are putting up Sh168 billion of their own money for this airport. They are entitled to know exactly what role if any a twice-prosecuted Zimbabwean businessman with an unresolved Sh17 billion election scandal hanging over him is playing in spending it, what he brings to the table beyond access to State House, and why, with elections eighteen months away, his name keeps appearing on the visitor list at Nairobi’s seat of power.
The runway construction starts next month. The questions cannot wait that long.
A Cairo-headquartered AI company operated for years inside Kenya’s public health system processing the bodies and medical secrets of tens of thousands of the country’s most vulnerable citizens without a single valid licence, data registration, or meaningful patient consent. The courts have now acted. But the data is already gone. This is the story of how it happened, who enabled it, and what the disaster that may yet come could look like.
THE MORNING A PATIENT’S LUNGS LEFT THE COUNTRY
The patient who walked into a public health facility in Kisii County for a chest X-ray did not know that the image of their lungs would, within minutes, leave Kenya entirely. They signed no form authorising it. They were told nothing of Egyptian cloud servers, of radiologists working from screens in Nairobi, Riyadh, or Cairo, of artificial intelligence systems ingesting their scan as raw training data. They came for a diagnosis. What they gave away, without knowing it, was far more.
Their DICOM file a digital imaging format that carries not just the scan itself but embedded metadata including patient name, date of birth, scan date, referring physician, and device identifiers was uploaded to the platform of Rology Medical Kenya Limited. From there, it transited to cloud infrastructure controlled by the company’s Egyptian parent, Rology Inc., headquartered in Cairo.
The report that came back may or may not have been produced by a radiologist holding a valid Kenyan licence. The scan itself may or may not have been used to train a proprietary artificial intelligence product now marketed across thirteen countries and sold to hospitals in the Middle East and Africa.
This patient does not know any of this. Neither, until recently, did the Kenyan public.
On or around June 12, 2026, Justice Patricia Mande Nyaudi of the Milimani Constitutional and Human Rights Division of the High Court changed that. In a ruling that should trigger a national reckoning, she ordered the immediate suspension of Rology’s Kenyan operations. The company which described itself as a revolutionary teleradiology solution expanding healthcare access to underserved Africans — was found to have operated outside the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Act, the Data Protection Act, the Digital Health Act, and the Digital Health (Data Exchange Component) Regulations 2025. The court further directed the Ministry of Health and the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council to revoke any licences or approvals tied to the handling of patients’ portable personal health records on the platform.
The ruling was decisive. The damage, however, was already done. By Rology’s own admission to the court, its platform had served more than 60,000 Kenyan patients and supported over forty public health facilities across the country. Those patients’ X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and associated medical histories are already in Cairo-controlled infrastructure. The court order cannot reach them there. Kenyan law cannot compel their deletion. The patients themselves have no accessible path to demand their removal, rectification, or compensation.
The privacy time bomb is not ticking. It has already detonated. The fallout is just not yet visible.
“Their X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, and medical histories are already in Cairo-controlled infrastructure. The court order cannot reach them there.”
THE COMPANY THEY DID NOT WANT KENYA TO SCRUTINISE
Rology was founded in Cairo in October 2017 by four entrepreneurs: Amr Abodraiaa, Moaaz Hossam, Mahmoud Eldefrawy, and Bassam Khallaf. Its pitch was compelling and, in the context of genuine access challenges in African and Middle Eastern healthcare systems, not without merit: a cloud-based, zero-setup teleradiology platform that matched patient scans with remote radiologists through AI-assisted intelligent matchmaking. No infrastructure investment required. No radiologist on-site needed. Just a laptop, an internet connection, and Rology’s platform.
The company positioned itself as addressing one of medicine’s most acute shortages. There are, by some estimates, fewer than one radiologist per million people across significant portions of sub-Saharan Africa. Fourteen African countries have no radiologists at all. Into this gap, Rology stepped with promises of thirty-minute turnaround times, twelve radiology sub-specialities, eight imaging modalities, and an AI system it claimed achieved 99.89 percent clinical accuracy.
The marketing was polished and the investor narrative was compelling. In October 2023, Rology secured 510(k) clearance from the United States Food and Drug Administration for its platform as a Class II medical image management and processing system. The company declared this clearance established Rology as “the world’s premier FDA-cleared on-demand and 2-sided teleradiology solution.” Its Chief Medical Officer, Mahmoud Eldefrawy, stated publicly that the clearance “emphasises our commitment to cybersecurity and regulatory adherence.” Its Chief Business Officer, Moaaz Hossam, called it “hope for countless medical providers, especially SMEs and the underserved public hospitals.”
In June 2023, Rology had already expanded into Saudi Arabia through the acquisition of Arkan United, a Jeddah-based teleradiology provider, for an undisclosed sum. By December 2025, it closed a growth funding round backed by an extraordinary roster of global health investors: the Philips Foundation, Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, the Sanofi Global Health Unit’s Impact Fund, and MIT Solve Innovation Future. The size of the round was not disclosed. The company said the funding would support expansion across the Middle East and Africa, with Kenya and Saudi Arabia cited as growth markets. Marketing materials released at the time highlighted the launch of eight AI tools and a network of over two hundred radiologists operating across more than thirteen countries, serving over three hundred hospitals.
What the press releases did not mention what the investors were apparently not told, or did not investigate was that Rology’s Kenyan operations were being conducted in comprehensive violation of the country’s legal framework. The company had never registered as a data controller or data processor under the Data Protection Act. It had never obtained the Certificate of Data Handler/Processor from the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner that the KMPDC had made mandatory, with a compliance deadline of March 31, 2025. Its AI platform had never been validated or certified under Kenyan law. The radiologists interpreting Kenyan patients’ scans were not verified to hold Kenyan licences. And the cross-border transfer of patients’ most sensitive health information was occurring without the explicit patient consent or adequate safeguards required by Section 48 of the Data Protection Act.
The company was not operating in a grey area. It was operating in comprehensive defiance of the rules governing every element of what it was doing.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF EXTRACTION
To understand what Rology actually built in Kenya, one must understand how its platform functions technically. Hospitals connected to Rology through a tool called Rology Connect, an automatic image acquisition system that uploads DICOM files directly from the facility’s imaging equipment to the platform. Those files — containing both the scan and the embedded metadata identifying the patient were encrypted and transmitted to Rology’s cloud infrastructure. The company’s servers, controlled from Cairo, then routed the files to available radiologists across its global network, matching cases by subspeciality and availability.
Rology told the court that reports were subsequently reviewed by licensed Kenyan radiologists before release to hospitals. The company also told the court that it had never sold patient data. But the question is not merely whether raw data was sold. The more complex and consequential questions are these: which radiologists, in which countries, reviewed Kenyan patient scans, and under what licencing authority? To what jurisdiction were those cloud servers actually subject? Were those scans used to train Rology’s eight proprietary AI tools? Were they retained after the diagnostic purpose was fulfilled? To whom, beyond the immediate interpreting radiologist, did the data become accessible? None of these questions were satisfactorily answered during proceedings.
What is known is the business result. In 2023, Rology’s Kenyan operations grew 169 percent in sales and 223 percent in gross revenues. That explosive growth was built directly on patient encounters: each scan generated a billable report and, crucially, a data asset. Each DICOM file that passed through Rology’s platform became, in a meaningful commercial sense, an input to the company’s artificial intelligence development pipeline. The AI tools Rology is now marketing across thirteen countries and positioning for global expansion were trained on radiology data. Some portion of that data came from Kenyan patients who were told they were getting a diagnostic service not that they were contributing their bodies to a foreign AI company’s commercial product development.
No benefit-sharing framework exists. No data governance agreement with the Kenyan facilities is publicly documented. No portion of the value created from Kenyan patient encounters has flowed back to those patients or to Kenya’s health system. The model is extractive by design: data flows in one direction, from Kenyan bodies to Egyptian servers, and value flows in one direction, from Kenyan encounters to a Cairo startup’s investor pitch deck.
“In 2023, Rology’s Kenyan operations grew 223% in gross revenues. That explosive growth was built directly on patient encounters each scan a billable report, and a data asset.”
THE CONSENT THAT WAS NEVER GIVEN
Informed consent in healthcare is not a bureaucratic formality. It is a constitutional right. Article 31 of the Constitution of Kenya guarantees every person the right to privacy, including the right not to have information relating to their family or private affairs unnecessarily required or revealed, and the right to have the privacy of their communications respected.
The Data Protection Act gives teeth to this right in the digital context, establishing specific obligations on data controllers and processors, including the requirement for lawful basis for processing, purpose limitation, and explicit consent for sensitive personal data.
Medical imaging data is among the most sensitive categories of personal information that exists. An X-ray, CT scan, or MRI reveals not just the presenting condition but potentially: reproductive health status, pregnancy, evidence of prior surgeries, signs of chronic or degenerative disease, potential genetic conditions, and markers of lifestyle that may be used for insurance or employment discrimination. DICOM files are particularly rich: the metadata embedded in each file can include patient identifiers, referring physician details, and scan parameters that may assist re-identification even if names are stripped.
The patients who used Rology’s platform through their public health facilities consented to a diagnostic scan. Full stop. They consented to their image being interpreted and a report being returned to their doctor. They did not consent to that image leaving Kenya. They did not consent to it being processed on Egyptian cloud infrastructure. They did not consent to it being interpreted by radiologists whose location, identity, and Kenyan licencing status were not disclosed to them. They did not consent to it being used as training data for commercial AI tools sold globally. They did not consent to its indefinite retention in a foreign jurisdiction.
The absence of consent for these secondary uses is not a minor procedural lapse. It is a fundamental violation of patients’ constitutional rights. The KMPDC had made this explicit in its December 2024 directive: data handler registration was mandatory by March 31, 2025, and the failure to obtain it would render processing of health data unlawful. Rology either ignored this directive or chose to continue operations in the knowledge that it was not compliant. The KMPDC, which issued the directive, took no visible enforcement action against Rology until the court forced its hand.
The court’s costs order against the KMPDC in the judgment is a quiet but pointed rebuke of an institution that put patient safety at risk through inaction.
THE DATA IN CAIRO: WHAT COULD GO WRONG
The suspension of Rology’s Kenyan operations does not retrieve the data. More than 60,000 patient records DICOM imaging files and associated clinical histories remain in Egyptian-controlled cloud infrastructure. They will remain there unless and until Rology is compelled to delete them, confirms their deletion, and that deletion is independently verified. None of these conditions has yet been met. The Kenyan state has no jurisdiction over Egyptian servers. The ODPC has no enforcement reach into Cairo. Affected patients have no practical mechanism to demand deletion, correction, or access to their own records in a foreign jurisdiction.
This creates a cascade of ongoing and escalating risks that do not diminish simply because the company’s Kenyan operations have been suspended.
The first and most immediate risk is cybersecurity. Teleradiology platforms are among the most targeted categories of healthcare infrastructure in the global ransomware economy. Medical imaging data is extraordinarily valuable: it cannot be changed, it contains highly sensitive personal information, and healthcare organisations under ransomware pressure have historically paid. The experience of radiology providers globally is instructive and alarming. Eastern Radiologists in North Carolina suffered a network intrusion in November 2023 that exposed the protected health information of 886,746 patients, including Social Security numbers, insurance information, and imaging results; the resulting class action settlement reached USD 3.25 million.
East River Medical Imaging in New York suffered a breach in 2023 affecting 605,809 individuals, settling for USD 1.85 million. Consulting Radiologists in Minnesota suffered a network intrusion in February 2024 affecting nearly 584,000 people, settling for USD 2.2 million.
In each case, stolen data included medical histories, diagnoses, imaging results, and financial information. In each case, that data was published on the dark web, placing affected individuals at risk of identity theft, insurance fraud, and targeted scams for years.
For Kenyan patients whose data sits on Rology’s servers, the risk is structurally similar but the recourse is structurally worse. American patients whose data was breached could file class actions in federal court, benefit from mandatory HHS breach notification requirements, and receive credit monitoring paid for by the settling defendants.
Kenyan patients whose data is breached from a Cairo-based company’s servers face a different reality: enforcement requires international legal cooperation, the company’s jurisdiction is Egyptian, and practical recourse for individual patients is close to nil.
The second risk is re-identification. The healthcare and technology research community has extensively documented that supposedly de-identified medical imaging data is far more re-identifiable than commonly assumed. DICOM files carry embedded metadata that can survive imperfect anonymisation. Medical images themselves particularly CT scans and MRIs contain unique anatomical features, body markers, implant signatures, and structural characteristics that sophisticated AI systems can use to re-link supposedly anonymous scans to specific individuals. Research published in leading radiology journals has confirmed that pixel-level patterns in medical images can be exploited through inference attacks conducted by third parties, revealing patient anatomy, demographics, and vendor-specific features.
The combination of de-identified imaging data with other available information including from prior data breaches, commercial data brokers, or social media can permit re-identification of individuals who believed their privacy was protected.
Once a patient is re-identified from their medical imaging data, the exposure is total. Diagnoses of cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, reproductive conditions, mental health indicators, chronic disease, addiction, and physical trauma are all potentially inferable from imaging data. This information is extraordinarily valuable to insurance companies seeking to deny coverage, to employers engaged in unlawful discrimination, to blackmailers, and to identity thieves. Healthcare data commands among the highest per-record prices on illicit markets precisely because it is uniquely sensitive and practically immutable.
The third risk is secondary commercial use. Rology’s AI tools were trained on radiology data. The company has launched eight AI products now marketed globally. There is no public disclosure of what proportion of the training data for these tools originated from Kenyan patients, under what governance framework that data was used, whether any retention or use limitations were imposed, or whether deletion of Kenyan patient data from AI training datasets an extraordinarily difficult technical undertaking is even possible at this stage. If Kenyan patients’ scans were used to train commercially deployed AI tools, those patients became unconsenting contributors to a commercial product generating revenue across thirteen countries, with no benefit flowing back to them.
The fourth risk is governmental access. Egypt’s legal framework for government access to data held by domestic entities differs materially from Kenya’s. Egyptian authorities may, under applicable Egyptian law, access data held by Egyptian companies on Egyptian or Egyptian-controlled servers. There is no guarantee that Kenyan patients’ health data would be protected from such access. Kenyan law has no jurisdictional reach over such requests or disclosures.
“Healthcare data commands the highest per-record prices on illicit markets because it is uniquely sensitive and practically immutable. These patients have no practical recourse.”
A GLOBAL PATTERN KENYA IGNORED
Kenya is not the first country to confront a foreign AI company using patient imaging data without adequate consent or governance. The pattern is global, and the warning signs were visible long before Rology’s Kenyan operations became the subject of litigation.
In Australia, the country’s largest diagnostic imaging provider, I-MED Radiology Network, shared patient chest X-rays, CT scans, and associated reports with health technology firm Harrison.ai to train an AI diagnostic tool later marketed as Annalise.ai. I-MED shared a dataset that reports described as containing fewer than thirty million images. Patients were not informed, and no consent was sought. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner opened preliminary inquiries in 2024. I-MED claimed the data had been de-identified; Harrison.ai distanced itself from responsibility, asserting that compliance was I-MED’s obligation. The OAIC ultimately concluded its inquiries without adverse finding, determining that the de-identification was sufficient. The episode nonetheless exposed a fundamental tension at the heart of AI healthcare development: patients generate the data; companies capture the value; patients are the last to know.
In the United States, a teleradiology company called The Radiology Group was required to pay USD 3.1 million to the federal government after a Department of Justice investigation found it had fraudulently billed Medicare and Medicaid for radiology services purportedly performed by US-based radiologists when the actual interpretations had been produced by contractors in India who were not permitted to practice medicine in the United States. American radiologists had simply rubber-stamped reports prepared offshore. The settlement directly echoes the accountability gap at the heart of the Rology Kenya case: patients and payers were told one thing; a different and less accountable arrangement operated in practice.
In Kenya itself, the anxiety over foreign custody of health data had already surfaced at the highest political levels. In December 2025 just months before the Rology ruling the High Court suspended key components of a USD 1.6 billion to 2.5 billion health cooperation framework signed between Kenya and the United States, after civil society petitioners argued it posed risks to Kenyans’ medical data and national sovereignty. Justice Bahati Mwamuye issued conservatory orders preventing the operationalisation of any provisions that “provide for or facilitate the transfer, sharing or dissemination of medical, epidemiological or sensitive personal health data.” The court was saying, with considerable clarity, that Kenya’s health data sovereignty was non-negotiable even in transactions with allied sovereign governments. That same principle applied, with equal force, to a Cairo-based AI startup. The regulatory system simply failed to apply it.
THREE INSTITUTIONS THAT LOOKED AWAY
The Rology scandal is, at its core, a story of institutional failure. The company did not operate covertly. It signed contracts with public health facilities. It pitched its services to counties and hospitals. It published marketing materials naming Kenyan partnerships. It submitted evidence to a court about its scale and growth. It was not invisible. It was simply not being watched by the people whose job it was to watch.
The Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council issued its data handler certification directive in December 2024 and made the March 31, 2025 deadline explicit. The penalties for non-compliance were clear: fines of up to KSh 5 million or 1 percent of annual turnover. There is no public record of any KMPDC enforcement action against Rology before the court ruling. The institution whose directive Rology was violating did not act. The costs order against the KMPDC in Justice Nyaudi’s judgment reflects the court’s assessment that the council bore responsibility for the environment in which this occurred.
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner had, by March 2026, handled over 9,000 complaints and issued enforcement notices and compensation orders in other sectors. It fined Nairobi Hospital for the unlawful use of a patient’s image in advertising materials. It pursued a credit company for sending unsolicited marketing messages. These are genuine enforcement actions on genuine violations. But the ODPC issued no enforcement notice against an operator that was processing the sensitive medical imaging data of over 60,000 Kenyans without registration as a data controller, without an ODPC certificate, and while conducting systematic cross-border data transfers in violation of Section 48 of the Data Protection Act. A company fined for using one patient photograph in an advertisement; a company transferring tens of thousands of patients’ CT scans to Egypt: one attracted enforcement action; the other did not.
The Digital Health Agency, established precisely to ensure data security and govern health data portability and exchange systems, produced no publicly available audit, statement, or regulatory intervention regarding Rology’s operations prior to the court ruling. Its mandate existed. It did not exercise it.
Into this regulatory vacuum, a private professional association the Kenya Association of Radiologists jfiled a petition at its own expense and pursued it to judgment. The KAR and its officials, led by Dr Gladys Mwango, Dr Brian Bwombuna, Dr Felister Wangari, and Dr Leonard Gikera, and represented by Conrad Law Advocates LLP, did what three government institutions with statutory mandates failed to do. The irony of that inversion a professional guild doing the work of state regulators should not pass without remark.
THE INVESTORS WHO FUNDED NON-COMPLIANCE
The December 2025 funding round that Rology closed was not the backing of a fringe operator. The Philips Foundation is the philanthropic arm of one of the world’s largest medical technology companies, with a stated mission of improving access to quality healthcare. Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures is the impact investing vehicle of the largest healthcare conglomerate on earth. The Sanofi Global Health Unit’s Impact Fund is backed by one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies. MIT Solve Innovation Future is associated with one of the world’s most respected research universities. These are not investors without the resources, expertise, or institutional capability to conduct due diligence on regulatory compliance in a specific market they cited as a growth engine.
Rology’s December 2025 press materials explicitly cited Kenya as a growth market. The round was raised to “support its expansion in the Middle East and Africa” and “widen access to faster diagnostics in low- and middle-income countries.” Kenya was the proof point, the operational example, the demonstration of impact. The investors who validated Rology’s growth narrative in December 2025 were, at that moment, less than three months from a court ruling that would find the operations they had funded to be in comprehensive violation of Kenyan law.
What due diligence was performed on Rology’s data protection registration status in Kenya? What due diligence was performed on whether interpreting radiologists held valid Kenyan licences? What due diligence was performed on the governance framework for cross-border patient data transfers? These are not arcane questions. They are the foundational compliance questions that any responsible investor in a healthcare platform operating in a regulated jurisdiction should be asking before committing capital. They remain, for now, unanswered. These investors owe the public a full account.
THE RECKONING THAT IS NOW REQUIRED
The court has ruled. Rology’s Kenyan operations are suspended. But the ruling closes a chapter that should not have opened; it does not resolve the consequences that are already in motion.
The Office of the Data Protection Commissioner must open a formal, urgent investigation into every aspect of Rology’s data operations in Kenya: what data was collected, how it was processed, where it was stored, to whom it was transferred, on what legal basis, what it was used for beyond the immediate diagnostic purpose, whether it was incorporated into AI training datasets, and whether any deletion or security protocols were implemented when operations were suspended. This investigation must have forensic rigour, not the procedural caution that characterised the ODPC’s pre-ruling inaction.
The Digital Health Agency must audit every public health facility that connected to Rology’s platform and produce a public account of the data that left those facilities, the legal basis on which it was transferred, and the current status of that data in Rology’s infrastructure. The results must be published. Affected counties and facilities must be named.
Digital Health Agency CEO Eng.Antony Lenaiyara
The KMPDC must account publicly for why its March 2025 compliance directive produced no enforcement action against Rology. The institution that issued the rules must explain why it did not enforce them.
Rology’s investors; Philips Foundation, Johnson & Johnson Impact Ventures, Sanofi, and MIT Solve — must each issue public statements describing the due diligence they conducted on regulatory compliance, data protection, and patient consent frameworks in Kenya before committing capital. The silence of global health investors when their portfolio companies are found to have processed tens of thousands of patients’ health records unlawfully is not a neutral position.
Most urgently, the sixty thousand-plus Kenyan patients whose data is in Egyptian custody must be informed. They must be told what data was taken, where it sits, what it was used for, what risks they face, and what steps are being taken to protect them. This notification should not wait for litigation or regulatory proceedings to conclude. It should happen now.
Kenya must also urgently accelerate the legislative and regulatory architecture that the Rology case exposed as insufficient. The Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026 must include binding provisions for high-risk healthcare AI applications, including mandatory registration, impact assessments, human oversight requirements, and explicit consent frameworks for secondary use of medical data. Cross-border health data transfers must be treated with the seriousness of critical national security infrastructure, not as an afterthought in investor pitch decks.
“These 60,000 patients did not sign up to become data points in a foreign AI pipeline. They went to a clinic for a scan. The system that was supposed to protect them failed at every level.”
WHAT ROLOGY DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW
Rology has deployed, in its public communications, a set of claims that warrant direct scrutiny in the light of the court’s findings.
The company claims FDA clearance validates its platform’s safety and legality. This is materially misleading. The FDA 510(k) clearance K231385, granted in October 2023, covers the platform as a Class II medical image management and processing system. It addresses the technical functionality of the platform image acquisition, encryption, transmission, and display. It does not confer any authorisation to operate medical services in Kenya. It does not address compliance with Kenya’s Data Protection Act. It does not constitute a licence to process Kenyan patients’ personal health data without their consent. The FDA clearance and Rology’s Kenyan legal obligations are entirely separate matters, and the company’s suggestion that one validates the other is false.
The company claims its platform disclaims responsibility for diagnostic accuracy. This liability escape is among the most troubling features of its model. Rology marketed accuracy rates as high as 99.89 percent while simultaneously, reportedly, disclaiming responsibility for the accuracy of medical reports generated through the platform. A patient who suffered harm from a misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis on the Rology platform would have faced a fractured accountability chain: a foreign parent company, global radiologists whose jurisdictional status is unclear, local validators, and AI outputs sheltered by pre-emptive liability shields. This is not a legitimate model for the practice of medicine.
The company claims it addressed radiologist shortages and expanded healthcare access. This argument has genuine merit as a description of need; it has no merit as a justification for operating outside the law. The shortage of radiologists in Kenya is real. The consequences of that shortage delayed diagnoses, missed cancers, undertreated conditions are genuinely severe. But those consequences cannot justify a company processing Kenyan patients’ most intimate health information without consent, without registration, without oversight, and in violation of the data sovereignty framework Kenya’s legislature and courts have established. Access without accountability is exploitation by another name.
The company claims it served public health facilities and therefore served public interest. What this framing conceals is the commercial reality: Rology was not operating a charity. It was a venture-backed startup that grew 223 percent in gross revenues in a single year in Kenya alone. The public facilities it served became, on this model, channels for extracting commercial value from Kenya’s most vulnerable patients. The rural patient in Kisii who went for an X-ray did not receive a subsidised service. They provided, without knowing it, commercial raw material for a Cairo startup’s AI development pipeline.
THE CLOCK STILL RUNNING
The data has already left. More than 60,000 Kenyans disproportionately from public health facilities, disproportionately from lower-income communities with the least capacity to assert rights or seek redres had their most sensitive medical information extracted, transferred across borders, and processed outside any framework they consented to or that Kenya’s law authorised. Some of them may have cancers detected in those scans. Some may have TB or HIV diagnoses inferable from their imaging. Some may have reproductive health conditions. Some may be identifiable from their anatomical features alone. None of them know their data is in Cairo. None of them can easily get it back.
Rology will likely appeal the suspension. The company has infrastructure, investors, and a global network. It is not going quietly. Its legal team will argue that its local affiliate is a duly incorporated Kenyan company, that its platform provides genuine healthcare benefits, that its AI tools meet international standards, and that the regulatory framework it was operating in was unclear. Some of these arguments have surface plausibility. None of them addresses the foundational fact that the company processed the health data of 60,000 Kenyans without legal authorisation and without the consent of the patients whose bodies it digitised.
The pattern of what happened in Kenya is not unique to Rology and not unique to Africa. Global AI companies, backed by global investors, are systematically mining health data from low-and-middle-income country populationspopulations with less regulatory capacity to resist, less legal infrastructure to pursue redress, and less political power to compel accountability. The data flows from the Global South to corporate servers in Cairo, Riyadh, Tel Aviv, and San Francisco. The AI tools trained on that data are sold back to the same markets at prices those populations struggle to afford. The patients who generated the value receive nothing. The investors who funded the extraction are celebrated at Davos.
Kenya has a functioning data protection law, a Constitutional Bill of Rights, and courts willing to enforce them. Those instruments worked here, eventually, thanks to the persistence of a professional association that was willing to spend its own resources fighting what the state would not. The question now is whether the state will finish what the courts started: whether the ODPC, the Digital Health Agency, the KMPDC, and the Ministry of Health will treat this ruling as a mandate for genuine reckoning, or whether they will allow it to pass as an administrative footnote while the clock on 60,000 Kenyans’ privacy runs out in silence.
The bodies have been digitised. The scans are in Cairo. And the accountability, at long last, must follow them there.
When Adil Arshed Khawaja was elected chairman of Safaricom PLC’s board in early 2023, barely a hundred days after President William Ruto’s inauguration and only weeks after his own appointment as a non-executive director, the framing offered to the Kenyan public was one of merit.
Khawaja, the managing partner of Dentons Hamilton Harrison and Mathews, one of Kenya’s oldest and most prestigious law firms, had chaired KCB Bank Kenya, sat on the boards of Kenya Power and the Kenya Wildlife Service, and built a reputation as a safe pair of hands.
‘Any President will not give a stranger the chairmanship of Safaricom,’ Khawaja told the Daily Nation in September 2024, in one of the more candid admissions a sitting chairman of Kenya’s most valuable listed company has ever offered to a journalist. ‘I have the knowledge and experience chairing many big companies.’
What Khawaja did not say, but what the same interview inadvertently confirmed in granular detail, is that his appointment placed at the head of Safaricom’s boardroom table a man whose primary professional identity managing partner of a law firm representing the controversial Adani Group in litigation over the attempted takeover of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport sat in direct, structural tension with his fiduciary duties to Safaricom’s shareholders.
Two years on, with Safaricom now engulfed in a data surveillance scandal that international rights organisations say may have facilitated enforced disappearances, with customer trust eroding visibly enough that ordinary Kenyans are publicly asking on social media whether the company serves citizens or the state, and with a foreign shareholder poised to take majority control of the company partly because its existing governance has proven so opaque, the question of who Adil Khawaja has really been working for at Safaricom deserves a far more rigorous answer than the one he gave eighteen months ago.
The question of who Adil Khawaja has really been working for at Safaricom deserves a far more rigorous answer than the one he gave eighteen months ago.
THE MAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF ‘MR FIX IT’
Khawaja’s own words remain the single most damaging piece of evidence in this story, because they were not extracted under pressure.
They were offered voluntarily, in a phone interview, by a sitting chairman of a Nairobi Securities Exchange-listed company explaining his own utility to the head of state. Asked about his role accompanying President Ruto on foreign trips a habit so consistent that Khawaja has appeared on the President’s travelling delegation more often than most Cabinet Secretaries Khawaja did not deny being described as the President’s ‘Mr Fix It.’ Instead he explained the function approvingly.
‘When you see the President going on a trip, he is going to talk to investors to invest in our country. He must have people that can help to provide the necessary advice,’ he said. He went further, describing Ruto as ‘my close friend of more than 30 years,’ adding, with a lawyer’s precision, ‘our friendship goes way back between our families. But I am not the President’s personal lawyer.’
That last sentence is the crux of the matter. Khawaja is correct that he is not, formally, the President’s personal lawyer. He does not need to be.
He is the managing partner of the law firm that employs the President’s son, that represents the Adani Group in litigation over Kenya’s most contested infrastructure transaction in a generation, and that simultaneously advises Konvergenz Network Solutions, a company sitting inside a Safaricom-led consortium that Khawaja, as Safaricom’s chairman, has publicly defended.
The lines between ‘friend of the President,’ ‘managing partner of the President’s son’s employer,’ ‘lawyer for the company seeking the President’s airport,’ and ‘chairman of the listed company whose balance sheet is entangled with all three’ are not blurry because journalists have blurred them. They are blurry because Khawaja occupies all four positions at once.
THE ADANI WEB: JKIA, KETRACO, AND DENTONS HHM
The starting point for understanding Khawaja’s conflicts is the Adani Group’s attempted thirty-year, two-billion-dollar lease of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport a transaction so opaque and single-sourced that it triggered court petitions from the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Law Society of Kenya, and a parliamentary committee hearing at which Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi was forced to articulate twenty-two conditions the government would impose on Adani before any deal could proceed.
Adani Airports Holdings Limited, the Adani Group subsidiary at the centre of the JKIA bid, retained Dentons Hamilton Harrison and Mathews Khawaja’s firm to defend it in the High Court case brought by KHRC and LSK. Khawaja did not deny this. He embraced it. ‘Adani is one of the biggest companies in the world,’ he told the Nation.
‘They are already running the Port in Tanzania and they want to expand across the East African region,’ a remark that reads less like a conflicted executive distancing himself from a controversial client and more like a business development pitch for future Adani-Dentons engagements.
Adani’s ambitions in Kenya were never confined to JKIA. The conglomerate was separately linked to a Sh95 billion contract with the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company, Ketraco, for high-voltage transmission infrastructure a deal that places Adani inside the same energy procurement ecosystem this publication has separately investigated in connection with Ketraco’s CEO recruitment irregularities.
The pattern that emerges is one in which a single Indian conglomerate, represented in Kenya by the law firm of Safaricom’s sitting chairman, was simultaneously pursuing the country’s largest airport concession, a nine-figure power transmission contract, and through an Abu Dhabi-linked holding structure a 59.55 percent stake in the consortium that won an $800 million government healthcare technology contract in which Safaricom itself holds a 22.56 percent stake.
THE SHIF CONFLICT: SAFARICOM IN BUSINESS WITH ADANI’S PARTNER
This is where the conflict stops being theoretical and becomes structural. The Integrated Healthcare Technology System, the digital backbone of President Ruto’s Social Health Insurance Fund programme, was awarded to a consortium in which Safaricom holds 22.56 percent, Konvergenz Network Solutions holds 17.89 percent, and Apeiro Limited holds 59.55 percent. Apeiro is a subsidiary of Sirius International Holding, an Abu Dhabi-based investment firm that is itself a subsidiary of International Holding Limited a corporate structure layered specifically, this publication’s sources in the corporate governance space note, to obscure beneficial ownership.
Sirius, critically, operates a joint venture with the Adani Group called Sirius Digitech Limited, which in mid-2024 acquired an Indian cloud computing firm, Coredge.io, in a deal both partners described as building a ‘sovereign AI and cloud platform.’
In other words, Safaricom the company Khawaja chairs entered an $800 million government contract as a minority partner alongside a firm, Apeiro, whose ultimate parent is in active joint-venture business with the Adani Group, the same Adani Group that Khawaja’s law firm represents in litigation against the Kenyan state over JKIA and that is separately pursuing the Ketraco transmission contract. Meanwhile, the third consortium member, Konvergenz, is represented in the SHIF deal by Dentons HHM Khawaja’s firm. Khawaja’s explanation, offered to the Nation, was that ‘we gave some preliminary advice to Konvergenz’ and that the SHIF programme predated his appointment as Safaricom chairman, having been initiated under former President Uhuru Kenyatta.
Both statements may be true. Neither resolves the conflict.
A chairman whose own law firm has an active client relationship with one party to a consortium his company has entered as a shareholder, where that consortium’s largest partner sits in a corporate web connected to a conglomerate his firm represents in litigation against the state, is not a chairman who can credibly claim to be exercising independent oversight on behalf of Safaricom’s minority shareholders.
A chairman whose own law firm has an active client relationship with a party to a consortium his company has entered as a shareholder is not exercising independent oversight on behalf of Safaricom’s minority shareholders.
NICK RUTO AND THE FAMILY BUSINESS OF GOVERNANCE
Layered onto this web is the employment of Nick Ruto, the President’s son and a qualified lawyer, at Dentons HHM the same firm, under Khawaja’s management, that represents Adani in the JKIA case. Khawaja’s defence of this arrangement, when pressed by the Nation, was procedural: ‘I didn’t even know that he had applied. We receive thousands of applications each year and he was one of the applicants, he went through the process and was selected.’ He further noted that the firm has previously employed other high-profile individuals.
Procedurally, this may well be accurate. Substantively, it is beside the point. The issue is not whether Nick Ruto’s hiring followed Dentons HHM’s standard recruitment process.
The issue is that the managing partner of the firm that employs the President’s son is simultaneously the chairman of the country’s most strategically important listed company, the President’s self-described travelling fixer, and a personal friend of three decades’ standing and that this entire arrangement sits atop a company, Safaricom, that handles the call records, location data, M-Pesa transaction histories, and digital lives of nearly fifty million Kenyans, data that the company has been accused of sharing with state security agencies implicated in abductions and killings.
When the chairman overseeing that company’s data governance has this many threads connecting him to the very state apparatus whose access to that data is the subject of international human rights concern, ‘I didn’t even know he had applied’ is not an answer to the governance question. It is a deflection from it.
RHINO CHARGE WHILE CUSTOMERS BURN
The texture of Khawaja’s priorities has not gone unnoticed by ordinary Safaricom customers, whose complaints about disappearing data bundles, dropped calls, malfunctioning 5G routers, and customer care channels that loop callers in circles without resolution have intensified publicly on social media even as the company’s PR machinery continues to promote its Ethiopian expansion, its M-Pesa revenue growth, and its sustainability credentials.
Kenyans on social media have pointedly noted that Khawaja’s public appearances alongside President Ruto extend beyond state investment trips into recreational territory, including the Rhino Charge, an off-road motorsport fundraiser for conservation in which Khawaja a longtime figure in Kenya’s wildlife conservation circles through his roles with the Rhino Ark Charitable Trust and the Kenya Wildlife Service has been a visible presence.
The juxtaposition is not merely rhetorical.
A chairman who has the time and inclination to accompany the head of state on overseas investment delegations and recreational motorsport events, while the company he chairs faces a deteriorating customer trust environment, an active data privacy scandal under High Court petition, and a looming change-of-control transaction that will determine the company’s leadership for a generation, is a chairman whose attention has visibly migrated away from the operational and governance failures piling up at Safaricom House.
THE PATTERN REPEATS: KCB AND KENYA POWER
This is not the first time Khawaja’s board career has intersected with institutions under public scrutiny.
He served eight years as a director of KCB Group between 2012 and 2020, the final four as chairman of KCB Bank Kenya a period that fell within the same banking sector this publication has separately documented for its pattern of fraud exposure across East Africa.
He also sat on the board of Kenya Power, departing in July 2020 as part of a broader reorganisation of the utility’s non-executive directors, a reorganisation that itself followed years of governance controversy at Kenya Power over procurement and tariff-setting irregularities.
The pattern across Khawaja’s board career is consistent: appointment to chair or direct large, strategically important, state-adjacent institutions, followed by periods of governance controversy during his tenure, followed by his continued public framing as a uniquely qualified boardroom operator notwithstanding those controversies.
WHAT THE VODACOM DEAL MEANS FOR KHAWAJA
The irony of Khawaja’s position is that the very Vodacom transaction this publication has previously examined under which Vodafone Kenya Limited will gain the power to nominate Safaricom’s next chief executive once Vodacom’s stake rises to 55 percent explicitly preserves a Kenyan chairmanship.
The shareholder agreement filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission states that VKL will ‘endeavour, insofar as possible’ to ensure the chairman is of Kenyan nationality, and the Kenyan government’s own December 2025 conditions go further, mandating that the chairman ‘shall at all times be’ a Kenyan citizen.
On the surface, this should protect Khawaja’s position even as the CEO’s office potentially returns to foreign-nominated hands.
But this protection cuts in an uncomfortable direction for Khawaja personally. If the chairmanship is the one senior position at Safaricom that remains insulated from Vodacom’s incoming oversight, then the chairman becomes, by default, the single most important check on whatever new CEO Vodafone Kenya nominates at precisely the moment when Safaricom’s data governance practices are under the heaviest international scrutiny in the company’s history, with Access Now and a coalition of global civil society organisations having written directly to Vodacom demanding an investigation into whether Safaricom facilitated human rights abuses through its data-sharing practices.
A chairman whose own professional and personal entanglements run as deep into the current administration’s commercial and family networks as Khawaja’s do is not obviously the independent check that moment requires.
If Vodacom’s new management is serious about resetting Safaricom’s governance culture as this publication has argued it must be the chairmanship cannot simply be treated as the safe, untouchable seat in the boardroom. It may, in fact, be the seat that most urgently needs fresh eyes.
THE QUESTION KHAWAJA AND NDEGWA CANNOT KEEP AVOIDING
Kenyans on social media have begun to ask, in increasingly pointed terms, why the loudest complaints about Safaricom on data privacy, on service quality, on customer care, on corporate arrogance have all intensified during the same period of leadership.
It is a fair question, and it deserves a fair answer, not from this publication, but from Khawaja and Ndegwa themselves, in public, under the same parliamentary scrutiny that Ndegwa has previously faced over the Vodacom transaction.
Specifically: how many data requests from security agencies has Safaricom received since the 2024 protests, how many carried court orders, how many were rejected, and who inside the company holds the authority to approve access to subscriber data? What internal safeguards exist when the agencies requesting that data are themselves the subject of credible allegations of enforced disappearance?
And, returning to the conflicts documented in this article, has Khawaja, as chairman, ever recused himself from any board discussion touching on Safaricom’s relationships with the Government of Kenya, given his firm’s representation of Adani, his firm’s employment of the President’s son, and his own description of his role as the President’s fixer?
If the answer to that last question is no, then the chairman of Kenya’s most powerful company has spent the most consequential two years of its modern history sitting at the head of the table with an undisclosed, unmanaged, and apparently unaddressed conflict of interest on virtually every matter where Safaricom’s commercial interests and the Kenyan state’s political interests intersect which, for a company that handles state surveillance requests, runs government health technology contracts, and is the subject of a change-of-control transaction requiring government approval, is to say: almost everything.
Safaricom’s customers built this company.
Its 65 percent market share, its M-Pesa dominance, its position as the most profitable company in East Africa all of it rests on the trust of nearly fifty million ordinary Kenyans who use its network every day for transactions that define their economic lives. That trust is not Adil Khawaja’s personal asset to leverage on behalf of a law firm’s client list, a presidential travel itinerary, or a family friendship of thirty years’ standing.
The silence from Safaricom’s boardroom on these questions, just as the silence on Ndegwa’s contract status, on the June 2024 internet outage, and on the surveillance allegations, is not discretion. It is an accumulating pattern of a board that has stopped treating accountability to the Kenyan public as a condition of its legitimacy.
In the early hours of April 25, 2026, an Isuzu D-Max double-cab pickup registration KCQ 222X, owned by Dawamu Academy Limited, a company controlled by businessman Philip Waithaka Kinuthia and his wife Claudia Wanjiru Waithaka, rolled several times along Ngong Road near Lenana in Nairobi.
Two young Ugandan women, both A-Level students at Peponi International School, were thrown from the vehicle and died at the scene. Others suffered life-threatening injuries.
What followed, according to witness accounts, official communications and court filings, was not merely an investigation into a fatal road crash but an alleged effort to shield the vehicle owner’s minor son from accountability.
The evening had begun as a celebration. Peponi School’s A-Level Class of 2026 had gathered with parents and staff at Muthaiga Country Club for their leavers’ dinner. At about 3:50 a.m., Karen Police Station received reports of a serious accident.
When officers arrived, five students were found in or around the wreckage. Two Ugandan students, Yzeera Ssebunya, daughter of African Wildlife Foundation CEO Kaddu Ssebunya and Doreen Ssebunya, and Danielle “Didi” Mirembe Kembabazi Kavuma, were pronounced dead at the scene. Another foreign student suffered devastating injuries and remains in a coma.
Wreckage of the pickup involved in the fatal accident.
Kinuthia Waithaka, a fellow student, a minor and allegedly the driver, escaped with minor injuries. One other student also survived with relatively minor injuries. Two additional students had reportedly been dropped off before the crash.
Multiple accounts identify Kinuthia Waithaka as the person behind the wheel.
A surviving student is said to have given two separate statements on April 25, one at 6:30 a.m. and another at 4:30 p.m., identifying him as the driver and alleging he had been drinking and speeding. One of the students who left the vehicle earlier has also reportedly identified him as the driver, while another is expected to provide testimony.
In a communication dated May 18, Peponi School headmaster Mark Durston reportedly stated that the businessman’s son had been driving when seven pupils left Muthaiga Country Club in the private vehicle.
Within days, however, a different account emerged.
On April 27, Philip Waithaka Kinuthia reportedly appeared at Karen Police Station accompanied by his 34-year-old nephew.
Both recorded statements claiming the nephew had been driving.
The nephew allegedly told investigators that he lost control while attempting to avoid a motorcycle travelling on the wrong side of the road in rainy conditions.
That account was contradicted by a police officer who attended the scene and reportedly stated that the road was dry and that the vehicle appeared to have been travelling at very high speed.
The family of the student who remains in a coma, through Murgor & Murgor Advocates and lawyer George Ouma, has laid out allegations of a cover-up in court filings and in a formal letter addressed to DCI Director Mohammed Amin.
Copies of the correspondence were sent to DPP Renson Ingonga, Attorney General Dorcas Oduor, the Kibera Chief Magistrate’s Court and Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi.
The family argues that the actions taken after the crash point to a deliberate effort to conceal facts that could result in criminal liability for both the vehicle owner and his son.
They have also criticised Peponi School for initially denying investigators access to student witnesses unless police obtained a court order and parental consent. By the time court approval was secured on June 5, examinations had concluded and students had dispersed.
Central to the family’s concerns is the claim that no alcohol test was administered to the alleged driver despite repeated witness allegations of intoxication. They further contend that basic accident-scene procedures were not followed.
According to the court filings, the businessman’s son was removed from the scene by family members after contacting them, even as critically injured students remained at the crash site. Police initially moved to charge the 34-year-old nephew with causing death by dangerous driving, a development that the victims’ families view as part of the alleged effort to divert responsibility.
In his statement, Kinuthia Waithaka reportedly claimed he had been asleep and only regained consciousness in hospital, insisting that his cousin had been driving.
However, the family points to a text message allegedly sent by him to a friend’s mother shortly after the crash.
“Good evening Aunty. I am so sorry from the bottom of my heart for putting you and your family in this position. … (Name withheld) is one of the strongest people I know and I know he will fight and pull through.”
The family argues that the message amounts to an acknowledgment of responsibility.
Ownership records also place the vehicle squarely within the Waithaka family’s control.
NTSA records indicate that KCQ 222X was imported in 2018 and registered to Dawamu Academy Limited.
Company records list Philip Waithaka Kinuthia as a director and majority shareholder, holding six shares, while Claudia Wanjiru Waithaka holds three shares and also serves as a director.
Reporting from Uganda, citing sources close to the victims, has further alleged that a designated driver arranged by parents had been available but was dismissed before the students departed.
The same reports claim adults present at the venue expressed concern about the condition of some of the departing students and warned against them driving.
Perhaps most striking has been the limited public scrutiny of the case within Kenya.
While Ugandan media carried extensive coverage of the tragedy and the questions surrounding it, reporting in Kenya remained sparse for weeks until the Daily Nation published a June 14 report detailing the allegations of a cover-up.
The contrast has fuelled concerns among relatives and observers who question why a crash involving multiple international students, two fatalities and allegations of interference attracted so little sustained attention.
The Kibera Chief Magistrate’s Court is expected to issue further directions on June 26 in proceedings initially filed by police to obtain access to student witnesses.
The family of the comatose student has since argued that the application has been overtaken by events and is now calling for a fully independent DCI investigation.
Their letter raises concerns about the handling of the case and warns of potential diplomatic ramifications given the nationality of several victims.
At its heart, this case is no longer solely about a fatal road accident.
It concerns allegations that a minor drove while intoxicated and at high speed, claims that he was removed from the scene by family members, conflicting accounts about who was driving, delayed access to key witnesses, the apparent absence of critical forensic testing and persistent questions about whether influential individuals attempted to shape the course of the investigation.
The families of Yzeera Ssebunya and Danielle Mirembe Kembabazi Kavuma, together with the family of the student who remains in a coma, continue to demand answers.
They argue that the evidence already before investigators, including witness statements, school communications, police observations, company records and the disputed text message, raises serious questions that cannot be ignored.
Kenya’s justice system possesses the legal tools necessary to establish the truth. The question confronting investigators is whether those tools will be applied without fear or favour.
For grieving families in Uganda and Kenya, the demand is straightforward: a thorough, transparent and independent investigation capable of determining exactly what happened on Ngong Road and whether anyone sought to obstruct the search for justice.
Anything less risks deepening public suspicion that influence and privilege remain capable of shielding the powerful from accountability while victims and their families are left searching for answers.
Nairobi — When Crown Paints Kenya Plc shareholders log into, or walk into, the company’s 68th Annual General Meeting on or around 19 June 2026, they will be asked to applaud a headline profit jump. They should think twice before clapping. Behind the celebratory tone of the chairman’s statement sits a balance sheet decision that should alarm every minority investor on the Nairobi Securities Exchange: while the Kenyan business generated almost the entirety of the group’s profit, the board chose to pour fresh capital into a Tanzanian unit that is bleeding money, wrote off the better part of a billion shillings in regional impairments, shut down a Kenyan manufacturing subsidiary, and paid its directors a combined package that swallows roughly a quarter of the entire group’s net earnings.
This is the story the glossy investor briefings will not tell you in plain language. This publication has gone through the company’s own disclosures, cross-checked them against regional reporting, and reconstructed the picture that Crown Paints management would rather shareholders did not piece together before they walk into the AGM hall.
A Kenyan Cash Cow Funding a Tanzanian Money Pit
Crown Paints Kenya Plc closed the 2025 financial year with after-tax profit up 74 percent to Sh948 million, a number management will be keen to put on every slide at the AGM. What the slides will gloss over is where that money actually came from, and where some of it has since gone.
The arithmetic is not subtle.
Kenya remains the overwhelming engine of this business, contributing the vast majority of group revenue, while the regional units in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda together account for only a small single-digit share. Yet it is precisely those regional units, and Tanzania above all, that have just absorbed a fresh Sh791.47 million capital injection, according to the company’s own annual report.
That injection lifts total cumulative investment in Crown Paints Tanzania Ltd to Sh1.56 billion, up from roughly Sh773 million the year before.
In other words, the board has effectively doubled down on a subsidiary that, in the very same financial year, triggered an impairment loss of Sh806 million on its own. Total impairment losses across the Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda units exploded more than fivefold year-on-year, from about Sh150 million in 2024 to Sh914 million in 2025.
An impairment of this scale is not an abstract accounting entry. It is the company’s own auditors and directors formally acknowledging that the value of the Tanzanian investment has collapsed on paper.
And yet, in the same breath, management told shareholders it was injecting still more cash into that same operation, while simultaneously discontinuing the operations of a Kenyan subsidiary, Crown Paints Allied Industries Limited, and beginning the process of deregistering it entirely.
Put plainly: a profitable Kenyan manufacturing footprint is being trimmed at the very moment a loss-making Tanzanian outpost is being expanded with a new depot in Dodoma, a new factory in Dar es Salaam, a remodelled distribution model, a freshly opened warehouse and showroom in Dar es Salaam, and new training and marketing budgets for painters and dealers across Tanzania. If this is a turnaround plan, it is one being financed almost entirely by Kenyan shareholders, for the benefit of a market that has yet to show it can stand on its own feet.
The Silence of the Finance Director
Perhaps the most damning detail in this entire saga is not a number at all. It is a non-answer.
Regional business publication The EastAfrican reported that it sought, repeatedly, to establish the cost of the new Dodoma depot project from Crown Paints Group Finance Director Patrick Mwati. Mwati did not respond to calls or text messages seeking that information.
This is not a minor administrative oversight. Mr Mwati is the finance director of a publicly listed company that is asking its shareholders to keep funding subsidiaries with a documented history of losses.
When a journalist asks a straightforward question about how much a flagship recovery project costs, and the finance director goes silent, shareholders are entitled to ask what exactly is being hidden, and from whom.
If the cost of the Dodoma project cannot be disclosed to the media, can it at least be disclosed, in full, with supporting board resolutions and projected returns, to the shareholders who are ultimately funding it? That is a question the AGM floor should not let Mr Mwati avoid a second time.
The Going Concern Admission Buried in the Fine Print
Crown Paints Kenya’s own annual report contains language that, read carefully, should worry any minority shareholder. The company discloses that Regal Paints Uganda Limited and Crown Paints Tanzania Limited have, in its own words, a history of losses, and that all of the group’s subsidiaries rely on the parent company for working capital, with their ability to continue as going concerns dependent on continued support from the Kenyan parent.
The parent company, the report states, has formally committed in writing to continue providing financial support to these subsidiaries indefinitely, to ensure they can keep trading.
This is, in effect, an open-ended guarantee underwritten by Crown Paints Kenya Plc, and therefore by every shareholder on its register, including the roughly one third of the company held by ordinary investors through the Nairobi bourse.
Despite this, the directors maintain that the outlook for the regional subsidiaries is promising, that they have no immediate plan to cease operations or liquidate any of them, and that they are confident the loss-making units will become profitable in the foreseeable future.
Shareholders have heard variations of this confidence before.
The Tanzanian unit’s investment has nearly doubled since 2024 while its impairments have grown more than fivefold. At what point does promising outlook become a euphemism for sunk cost fallacy on an industrial scale?
Sh244 Million for the Boardroom While a Kenyan Factory Shuts Down
If the Tanzania story is about where shareholder capital is going, the executive remuneration disclosures are about who is benefiting along the way.
According to the Directors’ Remuneration Report for the year ended 31 December 2025, total emoluments paid to eight directors came to Sh243.64 million. On a group net profit of Sh948 million, that is approximately 25.7 percent of the entire year’s earnings consumed by boardroom pay, before a single shilling reaches an ordinary shareholder.
The breakdown makes for uncomfortable reading at a time when a Kenyan subsidiary is being wound down and a Tanzanian one is absorbing fresh hundreds of millions. Vice-Chairman and executive director Hussein H.R.J. Charania received approximately Sh79.29 million, comprising gross earnings of Sh68.71 million plus an Sh8.58 million bonus. Finance Director Patrick M. Mwati, the same executive who would not return calls about the Dodoma project’s cost, took home approximately Sh63.36 million.
Outgoing Group CEO Dr Rakesh K. Rao, who stepped down from the role on 1 October 2025 after two decades at the helm, nonetheless received approximately Sh48.56 million for the year, a sum that reflects his long tenure but which shareholders may reasonably ask to have itemised in full, including any exit package, accrued leave, pension top-ups, or consultancy arrangements that followed his departure.
Incoming Group CEO Mustafa Turra, who only took office on 1 October 2025 after joining from Olam Agri, received approximately Sh30.18 million for a partial year in the role, including a bonus of roughly Sh11.71 million paid shortly after his appointment.
A signing bonus of that size, awarded within months of arrival and before any full-year performance can reasonably be assessed, is the kind of golden hello that shareholders in any market would be entitled to interrogate.
Non-executive directors were not left out. The remuneration report records sitting allowances and a category of other benefits, including housing, motor vehicles, school fees and cash allowances, totalling around Sh16 million across the board.
The Sh427 Million Question: What Shareholders Actually Get
Now place the boardroom number next to what ordinary shareholders are being offered.
The board has recommended a first and final dividend of Sh3 per share for the 2025 financial year, payable on the company’s 142.36 million issued shares. That works out to a total distribution of approximately Sh427 million to all shareholders combined, across every individual and institutional investor on the register.
Run the comparison again, slowly. Eight directors collectively received approximately Sh244 million in pay and benefits for the year. The entire shareholder base, more than 142 million shares spread across institutions, pension funds, and thousands of ordinary Kenyans, will receive approximately Sh427 million in total dividends.
Directors, as a group, walked away with well over half of what the entire shareholder base will collect, despite the fact that shareholders are the ones who own the company, who bear the risk of the Tanzanian write-downs, and who are underwriting the going-concern guarantees extended to loss-making subsidiaries.
To be clear, executive pay at a company of this size is not inherently scandalous, and boards are entitled to compensate talent competitively, particularly during a leadership transition.
But the test is proportionality and timing.
A board that has just recorded an Sh914 million impairment charge, that is asking shareholders to accept continued open-ended funding of loss-making foreign units, and that is shutting down a domestic subsidiary, is in a weak position to defend a remuneration bill equivalent to 25.7 percent of net profit and well over half the dividend pool. The optics alone should trouble any governance-conscious institutional investor on the register.
Who Really Calls the Shots: The Belize Connection
Any discussion of Crown Paints’ capital allocation choices is incomplete without understanding who actually controls the company.
Crown Paints Kenya Plc is majority controlled by Crown Paints and Building Products Limited, a Kenyan-incorporated entity holding approximately 48.42 percent of the shares. That entity is itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Barclay Holdings Limited, a company incorporated in Belize, an offshore jurisdiction. Barclay Holdings also holds a further 19.36 percent of Crown Paints Kenya directly. Combined, this gives the Belize-incorporated ultimate parent effective control of close to 68 percent of the company. The remaining roughly 32 percent is held by minority shareholders through the Nairobi Securities Exchange, including ordinary Kenyan investors and local pension and unit trust funds.
There is nothing illegal about an offshore holding structure, and many legitimately structured multinational groups use them. But when a company controlled from an offshore jurisdiction is simultaneously winding down a Kenyan manufacturing subsidiary, expanding a loss-making foreign unit with fresh shareholder-backed capital, and paying its insider-heavy executive team a remuneration package that dwarfs typical market benchmarks relative to net profit, minority shareholders are entitled to ask whether the structure is serving the company’s stated public shareholders, or a narrower set of interests sitting above the Kenyan listed entity.
Who Carries the Risk, and Who Cashes the Cheque
Strip away the corporate language and the picture that emerges is straightforward. Kenyan operations generate the profit. Kenyan shareholders, through retained earnings and the parent company’s formal support undertakings, are effectively financing the Tanzanian recovery bet. A Kenyan manufacturing subsidiary is being shut down and deregistered. Impairment charges of close to a billion shillings have been booked against regional assets in a single year. And against that backdrop, the people making these decisions awarded themselves a combined package of Sh244 million, more than half of what the entire shareholder base will receive in dividends.
If the Tanzanian bet pays off in future years, management will rightly claim credit for a courageous long-term strategy. But if it does not, and the track record so far, two consecutive years of rising investment alongside rising impairments, gives little comfort, it will be minority shareholders who absorb the loss through depressed share value and foregone dividends, while the executives who approved the strategy will already have banked their bonuses for 2025 regardless of the outcome. That asymmetry, heads the executives win, tails the shareholders lose, is precisely the kind of structure that good corporate governance frameworks exist to prevent.
The Questions Shareholders Should Put to the Board, On the Record
Ahead of the 68th AGM, shareholders, particularly the minority investors who collectively hold close to a third of this company, have every right to demand specific, numerical, on-the-record answers to the following questions. Vague reassurances about promising outlooks should not be accepted as a substitute for hard figures.
1. Why was a further Sh791.47 million injected into Crown Paints Tanzania Ltd, bringing cumulative investment to Sh1.56 billion, in the same financial year that the unit triggered an Sh806 million impairment charge? What independent valuation, sensitivity analysis or break-even model justifies this injection rather than a managed exit or restructuring?
2. What is the total, board-approved budget for the new Dodoma depot and the new Dar es Salaam factory, including land, construction, equipment and working capital? Why could Group Finance Director Patrick Mwati not provide this figure when asked directly by journalists, and will he provide it to shareholders today, in writing?
3. Given that the overwhelming majority of group profit is generated in Kenya, what was the precise rationale for discontinuing operations at Crown Paints Allied Industries Limited and initiating its deregistration? What happens to its employees, its physical assets, its land, and any outstanding liabilities or contracts?
4. How does the board justify total directors’ emoluments of Sh243.64 million, representing 25.7 percent of group net profit and more than half the total dividend payable to all shareholders, in a year marked by a near fivefold increase in impairment losses to Sh914 million?
5. What specific value did outgoing CEO Dr Rakesh Rao deliver in 2025 to justify approximately Sh48.56 million in compensation in a year he led the company for only nine months, and does this figure include any severance, consultancy, or post-departure retainer arrangements that should be separately disclosed?
6. What performance conditions were attached to the approximately Sh11.71 million bonus paid to incoming CEO Mustafa Turra within months of his appointment, and will any element of his or other executives’ bonuses be subject to clawback if the Tanzanian turnaround fails to materialise?
7. What related-party transactions, if any, exist between Crown Paints Kenya Plc or its subsidiaries on one hand, and Barclay Holdings Limited, Crown Paints and Building Products Limited, or any entity connected to members of the Charania family or other directors, on the other? Can the board table a full schedule of these transactions for the 2025 financial year?
8. What is the board’s realistic, numbers-based estimate of how much additional capital the Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda subsidiaries will require from the Kenyan parent over the next three financial years, and what is the projected impact of that funding commitment on future dividend levels and group gearing?
9. The annual report states the parent company has issued formal undertakings of continued financial support to loss-making subsidiaries. Can the board table these undertakings in full at the AGM, including any caps, conditions, or termination clauses?
10. Does the board accept that a remuneration structure under which directors are paid in full regardless of the outcome of the Tanzania investment, while minority shareholders bear the downside through impairments and constrained dividends, represents a misalignment of interests, and if so, what changes to remuneration structure will be proposed for 2026?
The Bottom Line
Crown Paints had a good year in Kenya. That is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the proceeds of that good year are being deployed in the interests of the shareholders who actually own this company, or in the interests of preserving a regional footprint and a remuneration structure that primarily benefits a small group of insiders sitting atop an offshore-controlled corporate pyramid.
A Kenyan factory is being shut down.
A Tanzanian subsidiary with a documented history of losses and a freshly booked Sh806 million impairment has just received Sh791 million more in capital, on top of the Sh773 million already sunk into it. The finance director will not say what the new Dodoma project costs. And the people who signed off on all of this paid themselves Sh244 million, more than half of what every shareholder combined will receive in dividends.
The 68th AGM should not be a coronation. It should be the moment Crown Paints’ board is required, in public, on the record, and in numbers, to explain exactly how this adds up in the interests of the shareholders who put their capital behind this company. Anything less, and the promising outlook so often invoked in the company’s filings will remain exactly what it has been for the past two years: an expensive, unverified promise, paid for by Kenyan shareholders, with no one yet held to account.
Kenya’s National Assembly has once again been forced to confront the uncomfortable question of whether the country’s banking halls are as safe as the marketing campaigns claim.
On the floor of Parliament on February 24, 2026, Hon. John Waithaka, the Member of Parliament for Kiambu, rose under Standing Order 44(2)(c) to demand a formal statement from the Departmental Committee on Finance and National Planning regarding the disappearance of approximately three million shillings from two accounts belonging to Mr. Kennedy Karanja Macibu, a customer of Absa Bank Kenya.
According to the statement read before the House, Mr. Macibu, identified through his national identification number, was going about his evening on September 15, 2025, at around eight o’clock, when his phone began lighting up with transaction alerts he had neither initiated nor authorised.
By the time the dust settled, close to three million shillings had vanished from his two Absa accounts.
He moved quickly, contacting the bank to lock down what remained, lodging a formal complaint with Absa and reporting the matter to the Nairobi Central Police Station, where it was logged under OB Number 81 of 16/09/2025. Months later, Mr. Macibu is still waiting for the kind of clarity that should have come within days.
On paper, this looks like an isolated misfortune, the kind of unlucky episode that could befall any bank in any country.
But a closer examination of Absa Kenya’s recent history, drawn from court judgments, regulatory disclosures, whistleblower testimony and a string of separate customer disputes, suggests something far less comforting. Mr. Macibu’s ordeal fits inside a much larger and uglier picture, one in which the bank’s own staff, systems and digital lending arms have repeatedly been implicated in the very fraud the institution claims to be fighting.
The Karen Prestige branch and the manager who opened the vault to strangers
Perhaps the most damning evidence of internal rot at Absa Kenya is not speculation or anonymous chatter but a written judgment of the Employment and Labour Relations Court. The case centres on Lilian Adhiambo, the former branch manager of Absa’s Karen Prestige branch, whose dismissal the court upheld after forensic investigators tied her to the loss of millions from customer accounts.
Court records show that on October 13, 2019, a withdrawal of Sh3.6 million was processed from a customer account at the Karen Prestige branch.
In the days that followed, additional withdrawals and electronic transfers pushed the total loss past Sh6.3 million, all of it bearing Adhiambo’s authorisation. When the matter reached the Employment and Labour Relations Court, Justice Radido Stephen delivered a verdict that left little room for ambiguity.
The judgment described gross misconduct, negligence and failure of due diligence on the part of a senior banking officer who, after two decades inside the institution, used her authority to wave through transactions that should have triggered alarm bells across the bank’s control systems.
The forensic investigation behind the case was conducted by Absa’s own internal investigations unit, which means the bank’s findings and the court’s findings are aligned: a senior manager, entrusted with safeguarding customer deposits, instead became the weak link through which Sh6.3 million walked out the door.
The court upheld her dismissal as fair and lawful, closing one legal chapter while opening a far bigger institutional question. If a branch manager with two decades of tenure could move millions out of customer accounts before anyone noticed, what does that say about the controls protecting every other account in the branch network, including the two accounts belonging to Mr. Macibu more than a thousand kilometres and six years removed from Karen?
Timiza and the allegations of a black market for customer data
If the Karen Prestige case shows what a single rogue manager can do with the keys to the vault, a separate and far more explosive set of allegations points to something organised, sustained and operating at a much higher level inside the bank’s digital lending arm.
A whistleblower from within Absa Kenya’s Timiza digital credit department came forward with claims that strike at the heart of the bank’s ability to protect the personal and financial information of millions of customers.
The whistleblower alleged that since 2023, Timiza had been collecting customer data without consent, and that this data was being exploited well beyond the bounds of any loan application. The allegations named senior figures inside the credit and risk functions and accused them of fostering a culture in which customer information became a tradeable commodity.
According to the whistleblower account, Absa’s data centre in Westlands, referred to internally as the Data Office, became a hub where customer records, including credit card details and mobile banking information, were allegedly extracted and sold for as much as one thousand shillings per record.
The claims extended to a senior technical lead within Timiza, who was accused of acquiring more than one hundred thousand customer records for personal use, while other senior figures allegedly explored ways to monetise the stolen data during internal meetings. The whistleblower further claimed that attempts to raise these concerns through Absa’s own internal reporting channels were met with intimidation and obstruction, leaving the individual no option but to go public.
The timing of these revelations was not accidental. They emerged amid a Central Bank of Kenya investigation into a cluster of complaints against Absa covering insider fraud, sexual harassment and other ethical failures, an investigation that itself followed an internal probe ordered by Absa Group in South Africa into the conduct of its Kenyan operations.
Sources familiar with that probe described a culture in which junior staff were allegedly expected to pay their way into promotions and in which favours of a deeply troubling nature were said to function as currency for career advancement inside certain branches.
A death that still casts a shadow over the Nyali branch
Among the most unsettling threads connected to this wider picture is the death of Oscar Owino, an employee at Absa’s Nyali branch, who died in August 2023 under circumstances that colleagues reportedly found suspicious.
Accounts circulating among insiders link his death to a romantic dispute involving a fellow employee, and the case has since been cited repeatedly by whistleblowers as part of a broader pattern of dysfunction inside branches where personal entanglements, internal politics and financial irregularities appear to overlap in ways that have never been fully and publicly explained.
When fraudsters know more than they should
For ordinary Absa customers, the most frightening dimension of this unfolding story is not the size of any single loss but the sophistication of the fraud being reported. Accounts shared in connection with the wider scandal describe customers receiving phone calls that appear, on caller ID, to come directly from Absa’s official customer care line.
The caller, claiming to be investigating an unauthorised withdrawal attempt, asks the customer to confirm account details in order to protect the very funds that are then drained shortly afterward.
This is precisely the scenario the Timiza whistleblower warned about: that stolen customer data, once in the wrong hands, can be weaponised to give external fraudsters enough personal detail to walk straight past the suspicion threshold of even the most careful account holder.
When a fraudster already knows your name, your account numbers, your recent transaction history and your registered phone number, the line between an external scam and an inside job becomes almost impossible for the victim to detect, and arguably impossible for the bank to credibly deny.
A bank already under siege from multiple directions
Mr. Macibu’s case and the Karen Prestige scandal are not occurring in isolation. Absa Kenya is currently the subject of a separate High Court matter brought by Phyilis Osoro Kemunti, who is seeking to have historical references listing her as a defaulter on a credit card account expunged, alongside damages for what she describes as reputational harm.
Online, the picture is no less flattering. Customers describing their experiences on social media and discussion forums have ranked Absa among the most frustrating banks to deal with in Kenya, citing transaction failures, unresolved money disputes, unexplained penalties on loan accounts and what many describe as a wall of silence when something goes wrong.
Even the bank’s commercial relationships have not been spared.
In May 2026, Absa was drawn into a governance dispute at Nairobi’s century-old Vetlab Sports Club, where rival factions accused the bank of altering the signatories on the club’s main account, which held approximately Sh26 million, without proper authority and despite ongoing litigation over who actually constituted the club’s lawful leadership.
The club’s chairman and honorary secretary took the matter to the High Court’s Commercial and Tax Division, and court papers reportedly showed that Absa had previously resisted similar requests during earlier phases of the same dispute, making the sudden reversal difficult for the bank to explain.
Separately, the bank finds itself entangled in one of the largest alleged loan fraud cases in recent Kenyan banking history.
Industrialist Benson Sande Ndeta and an American co-accused are facing twelve criminal counts over an allegedly fraudulently obtained Sh4.5 billion facility, originally advanced when Absa still operated under the Barclays brand in Kenya, secured using what prosecutors describe as forged corporate guarantees and fabricated board resolutions.
Arrest warrants were issued for both men in March 2026 after they failed to appear in court, and the warrants were extended later that month after continued defiance of court orders. Whatever the eventual outcome, the case is a reminder that a lender which prides itself on rigorous documentation and credit discipline was, on its own telling, deceived at the highest level by paperwork its own systems failed to catch.
The numbers behind the headlines
All of this is unfolding against a backdrop of deteriorating financial performance and a sector-wide fraud surge that regulators have struggled to contain.
Absa Kenya’s profit after tax for the first quarter of 2026 fell to Sh5.31 billion, down from Sh6.17 billion a year earlier, marking the bank’s first first-quarter profit decline in nine years.
The Central Bank of Kenya’s own Financial Sector Stability Report for 2025 documented that cyber fraud cases across the banking sector more than doubled in a single year, rising from 153 to 353 incidents, with total losses jumping from Sh412 million to Sh1.59 billion.
Mobile banking fraud alone accounted for Sh810.68 million of those losses, a rise of 344 percent, while card fraud surged sixteen-fold to Sh263.29 million and identity theft losses rose sixfold to Sh199.08 million.
Against figures like these, Absa’s own 2022 disclosure that it lost Sh107.7 million to fraudsters, of which only a portion was recovered, no longer reads as an unfortunate one-off. It reads as an early data point in a trend line that has only steepened since, a trend line into which Mr. Macibu’s Sh3 million now slots with grim familiarity.
A voluntary exit programme that raises more questions than it answers
The timing of Absa’s broader restructuring has not gone unnoticed either.
Earlier in 2026, the bank ran a voluntary exit programme that saw 82 employees leave with a combined Sh717 million in severance packages, officially framed as part of a technology-driven streamlining of the workforce.
For a bank simultaneously facing whistleblower allegations of data theft inside its digital lending division, a Central Bank investigation into insider fraud and sexual harassment, and a court judgment confirming that a senior branch manager helped drain millions from customer accounts, the exodus of dozens of staff raises an obvious question that Absa has yet to answer publicly: how many of those departures were genuinely voluntary, and how many were the quiet conclusion of internal disciplinary processes the bank would prefer not to discuss in public?
What Absa owes Mr. Macibu, and everyone else
None of this excuses or explains away what happened to Mr. Macibu specifically. His case stands on its own and deserves its own forensic accounting. But it cannot be assessed in a vacuum, and Parliament’s intervention should not be treated as a routine, one-off inquiry into a single customer’s bad luck.
Taken together with the Karen Prestige judgment, the Timiza whistleblower allegations, the Vetlab Sports Club signatory dispute, the Sh4.5 billion Ndeta case and the broader sector-wide fraud data, Mr. Macibu’s three million shillings looks less like an anomaly and more like the latest visible tip of an iceberg that Absa Kenya has spent years trying to keep below the waterline.
Absa Bank Kenya does maintain whistleblowing channels, directing concerns to dedicated email addresses for anonymous tip-offs and priority investigations, and the bank’s security communications continue to emphasise customer vigilance, multi-factor authentication and prompt reporting of suspicious activity. Mr. Macibu did everything right.
He noticed the alerts, secured his accounts, filed a formal complaint and reported the matter to police within hours. If a customer who follows every recommended step can still be left waiting months for answers, then the failure is not his, and it is not external. It sits squarely inside the bank’s own walls.
Parliament has now asked the question publicly. The Central Bank of Kenya, already investigating Absa over insider fraud and ethical failures on multiple fronts, has the evidence and the mandate to demand a full forensic audit of the Macibu case, including transaction logs, staff access records and verification protocols at the time of the withdrawals, and to examine whether any link exists between his case and the data practices the Timiza whistleblower described.
Kenyan depositors are watching, and after years of mounting allegations, vague reassurances about ongoing investigations will no longer be enough. Absa Kenya now has a choice: open its books, name names, and show its house is in order, or continue to watch its reputation erode one drained account at a time.
Secret footage released by ZimEye this weekend has exposed what appears to be a sophisticated cross-border gold smuggling operation moving more than 500 kilograms of Zimbabwean gold into Kenya.
The material, reportedly recorded in April and May 2026, depicts industrial-scale handling of gold alongside large quantities of United States currency, all moving through networks that present themselves under religious and diplomatic branding.
The footage opens inside a warehouse packed with wooden shipping crates marked “FRAGILE” and “THIS SIDE UP.” Investigators documented trays and metal cases filled with gold nuggets and flakes. One consignment label, placed beside copies of Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper, reads: “AMBASSADOR ENOCK – ZIM 500KGS NUGGETS 14-04-2026 NAIROBI – KENYA.”
Another tag references “AMBASSADOR ENOCK K 29-JAN-2026 NAIROBI – KENYA.”
In a separate segment, bundles of US$100 notes wrapped in plastic are seen being prepared for transport. The scale of the operation suggests a coordinated logistics network rather than isolated smuggling activity.
At the centre of the allegations is Enock Mangirande, who publicly identifies himself as a “spiritual son” of Zimbabwean preacher Uebert Angel.
According to ZimEye, investigators sought Mangirande’s response regarding the consignments, warehouse activities and payments allegedly made in Nairobi around May 14, 2026. His reply consisted of three words: “What’s your agenda?” He offered no further explanation.
The alleged movements occurred during a period when Maynard Manyowa, spokesman for preacher Shepherd Bushiri, and journalist Hopewell Chin’ono were engaged in a public campaign targeting opposition leader Nelson Chamisa using controversial audio recordings that were later challenged.
Manyowa has long been associated with circles linked to Angel and senior figures within Zimbabwe’s ruling establishment. The overlap between high-profile political distractions and major illicit financial movements echoes patterns documented during the 2023 Gold Mafia investigations conducted by ZimEye in partnership with Al Jazeera.
Those investigations exposed how Zimbabwe’s vast gold reserves have allegedly been exploited through networks of politically connected dealers and intermediaries.
Gold, Zimbabwe’s largest export, is officially meant to pass through Fidelity Gold Refinery under the oversight of the central bank. However, investigators found evidence suggesting that substantial volumes were diverted into parallel markets.
The Gold Mafia series documented competing smuggling syndicates, including networks linked to Kamlesh Pattni and Ewan Macmillan, moving tonnes of gold to Dubai while facilitating large-scale money laundering operations. Angel himself appeared in the investigation as an individual allegedly capable of arranging access to senior government figures.
Pattni’s history provides a direct link between Kenya and Zimbabwe.
In the 1990s, he was the central figure in Kenya’s notorious Goldenberg scandal, a fraudulent gold and diamond export compensation scheme that cost Kenyan taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Although he faced criminal charges, no conviction was secured.
After leaving Kenya, Pattni established himself in Zimbabwe, where he became involved in gold and diamond trading operations and at times adopted the religious identity “Brother Paul.” In December 2024, the United States Treasury imposed sanctions on Pattni and a Zimbabwe-based network comprising 28 individuals and entities accused of involvement in gold smuggling and money laundering activities.
Zimbabwe continues to suffer substantial losses from illicit gold trading. Independent estimates suggest that between US$1.5 billion and US$2 billion is lost annually through gold smuggling and related illicit financial flows.
Much of the gold originates from artisanal and small-scale miners whose production is acquired by middlemen before entering informal export channels. Other quantities are allegedly under-declared before export. The result is a significant loss of tax revenue and foreign exchange earnings for the Zimbabwean economy.
The emergence of Kenya as a destination raises important questions.
Nairobi offers access to regional transport networks, financial infrastructure and commercial links that make it attractive to transnational operators. The footage appears to show both gold deliveries and cash transactions taking place within the Kenyan capital.
Whether the metal was destined for refining, re-export under new documentation or integration into regional grey markets remains unclear. What is increasingly evident, however, is the possibility that Kenya is becoming a more significant transit point in a criminal economy that exploits weak border controls, cash-based transactions and elite patronage networks.
The use of titles such as “Ambassador” and references to “spiritual sons” appears consistent with tactics highlighted during the Gold Mafia investigations. Religious affiliations and prophetic branding have often provided influence, access and a degree of insulation from scrutiny.
The same networks that publicly project spiritual authority are now being linked, through the footage, to large-scale movements of gold and cash.
This is far from a victimless enterprise.
Every kilogram of gold diverted from official channels represents lost public revenue, reduced foreign exchange reserves and fewer resources for essential services. For Kenya, the movement of undeclared gold and bulk cash creates significant money laundering risks and exposes the country’s financial system to greater international scrutiny.
The sanctions imposed on Pattni-linked networks demonstrated that global regulators are paying close attention to Zimbabwe’s gold trade. The apparent use of Kenyan routes only expands the regional implications.
Mangirande’s response, “What’s your agenda?”, may have been brief, but the footage itself answers that question.
The agenda is transparency.
If the material is authentic, it points to a sophisticated operation that has enriched a connected few while depriving citizens in both Zimbabwe and Kenya of economic benefits that should flow through legitimate channels.
ZimEye says additional material will be released in the coming days. Authorities in both Harare and Nairobi now face mounting pressure to investigate.
The gold may be labelled Zimbabwean, but the consequences of its alleged smuggling extend far beyond national borders. The victims are ordinary citizens across the region.
The founder and chief executive officer of mTickets Kenya, Brian Okinyi, has been ordered by a court to refund more than Sh527,000 to an Eldoret event organizer after failing to remit ticket sales collected through the company’s platform.
The ruling by the Eldoret Small Claims Court is a major victory for event promoter Marcelina Kiplagat, whose company, Vibrant Vibes Entertainment, organized the highly publicized Backyard Soiree concert that brought South African Amapiano star Tyler ICU to Eldoret in October 2025.
The dispute centered on ticket revenue collected by mTickets, one of Kenya’s leading digital ticketing platforms. According to court documents, Vibrant Vibes Entertainment entered into an agreement with mTickets and Baniyas Square Lounge under which the ticketing company would collect and remit proceeds from ticket sales for the event held at Rupa Grounds on October 5, 2025.
Tickets were sold at Sh1,000 for early bird purchases, Sh1,500 during the advance sales phase and Sh2,000 at the gate. The event attracted 359 paying attendees and generated total revenue of Sh565,800 through the mTickets platform.
Under the agreement, mTickets was entitled to an 8 percent commission on every ticket sold. After deducting its commission of Sh39,606, the company was expected to transfer Sh526,194 to the organizer within 72 hours after the event.
But the money never arrived.
Kiplagat told the court that the failure to release the funds left her struggling to settle obligations amounting to nearly Sh1 million owed to performers, suppliers and service providers who had worked on the concert.
She further stated that despite numerous follow-ups and attempts to resolve the matter outside court, the funds remained unpaid, forcing her to seek legal intervention.
In his defense, Okinyi denied that a valid service agreement existed between the parties. He also argued that the suit had been filed prematurely, claiming the parties had failed to first pursue dispute resolution mechanisms outlined in the contract.
However, the court found his arguments unconvincing.
In its judgment, the court concluded that sufficient evidence had been presented to prove the existence of a contractual relationship between the parties. Among the evidence produced was an agreement dated September 15, 2025, as well as ticket sales statements generated by the mTickets platform itself.
The court noted that while the agreement had only been signed by Okinyi, the claimant had demonstrated that the parties had a prior working relationship and had previously conducted business under similar arrangements.
The judge further observed that ticket sales records generated by mTickets strongly supported Kiplagat’s claim that the company had collected revenue on behalf of the event and was therefore obligated to remit the funds.
“The existence of such records, originating from the Respondent, corroborates the Claimant’s assertion that the Respondent provided ticketing services for the event,” the court ruled.
The court also dismissed Okinyi’s claim that the case had been filed prematurely, noting that he failed to provide evidence supporting his position.
Consequently, the court ordered him to pay Sh527,923 to the organizer, bringing to a close a dispute that has attracted attention within Kenya’s entertainment industry.
The ruling is expected to send a strong message to digital ticketing firms and event service providers about the importance of honoring contractual obligations and promptly remitting funds collected on behalf of clients.
For event organizers who increasingly rely on online ticketing platforms to manage sales and cash flows, the judgment underscores the legal protections available when contractual agreements are breached and revenues fail to reach their intended recipients.
While Mary Wambui Mungai’s lawyers were in the Kiambu High Court arguing that the public has no further business knowing about her Sh2.2 billion tax evasion prosecution, Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu was finalising a report that hands the public something new to know.
In her audit for the year ending June 2025, Gathungu flagged conflict-of-interest concerns over contracts awarded to companies linked to a Communications Authority board chairperson and another board member under the Kenya Kwanza administration’s digital superhighway project.
One of those companies, Nightigale Enterprises Ltd, now trading as Nightigale (E.A) Limited, implemented Sh401.6 million worth of fibre optic works in the 2024/2025 financial year alone. The other flagged firm, linked to an unnamed board member, took Sh82.16 million.
The timing could not be worse for a woman whose entire legal argument before the Kiambu court rests on the claim that her past is irrelevant to her present.
A Project Built On Sh15 Billion And A Long List Of Names
The digital superhighway project is the centrepiece of the Kenya Kwanza administration’s digital economy agenda: 100,000 kilometres of fibre optic cable, 25,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots, 1,450 Digital Village Smart Hubs and three data centres, financed in two phases worth roughly Sh15 billion through the Universal Service Fund, a pool of money the Communications Authority itself manages. ICTA, the ICT Authority, was designated the procuring entity, while the CA retained budget approval and contractor payment functions, a division of labour that the Consumers Federation of Kenya (Cofek) has argued in court keeps the CA directly implicated regardless of who signs the tender documents.
Sixty-two firms bid for the backbone and metro tenders when they were opened on March 28, 2023. Seventy-five bid for public Wi-Fi. Nightigale Enterprises Ltd was one of them, and it won.
The Auditor-General’s Finding
Gathungu’s report does not deal in allegations from activists or opposition figures. It is the constitutional audit office’s own conclusion, based on a review of bidders’ company ownership documents, CR12 forms and the resumes of CA board members.
Her finding states that two companies in which the CA board chairperson and a board member held controlling interests were awarded contracts by ICT Authority under the digital superhighway project, and that the relevant board members were either managing directors or shareholders of those companies at the point the tenders were opened and evaluated, on February 28 and March 28, 2023 respectively. She further found that the board members in question resigned from their companies only after the contracts had already been awarded.
“Audit review of the bidders’ company ownership document, CR 12 and resume of board members, revealed that two companies in which the Board Chairperson and a Board member of CA had controlling interest in, were awarded contracts by ICT Authority.” — Auditor-General Nancy Gathungu
That is the audit office’s language, not a campaigner’s. It places the conflict not at the moment of appointment, and not at the moment of contract signing, but squarely at the moment that matters most in procurement law: when bids were opened and evaluated.
The Paper Trail Nightigale Would Rather You Not Trace
Nightigale Enterprises Ltd was incorporated in March 2012 with Peter Njoroge Muchoku and Grace Wanjiku Muchoku holding the company’s entire 800-share pool. Over the following decade, the company’s ownership changed hands with a frequency that has little obvious commercial logic but a great deal of political logic once the dates are laid against Mary Wambui’s own career.
In November 2014, Grace Muchoku exited and Evelyn Nyambura Mungai, Wambui’s daughter, entered as a director and shareholder, allotted 200 shares the following day. Business Registration Service records show a separate share movement dated October 20, 2014, even before Nyambura’s formal entry, in which the Muchokus transferred shares to her and to a Mr Ephantus Githui Gathieka. In 2018, Nyambura resigned and transferred her shares to Gathieka and back to Muchoku. In 2019, Muchoku resigned and forfeited 500 shares, which went to a Ruth Kinyanjui Waithira; Gathieka then resigned and his 500 shares went to a Samuel Kariuki Githui.
Mary Wambui herself first appears on Nightigale’s official ownership records on April 9, 2020, when Kariuki and Waithira transferred 300 shares each to her. The following month, May 20, 2020, she was appointed a director.
Then came the period that the Auditor-General’s report and Cofek’s court petition are really about.
In August 2022, ahead of that year’s general election, Evelyn Nyambura returned to Nightigale as a director after Kariuki transferred his remaining 200 shares to her. On December 2, 2022, President William Ruto appointed Mary Wambui chairperson of the CA board. Three days later, on December 5, 2022, Wambui resigned as a Nightigale director and, according to BRS records, transferred 500 shares to her daughter Evelyn, who now held 700 of the company’s 1,000 shares, a 70 percent stake.
A week after that share transfer, the CA signed a memorandum of understanding with ICTA committing Sh5 billion of Universal Service Fund money to the first phase of the digital superhighway. Two months later, in February 2023, ICTA advertised the backbone and metro tenders. They were opened on March 28, 2023, with Evelyn Nyambura still holding her 70 percent stake in Nightigale at the time, according to Cofek’s court filings.
On April 17, 2023, the CA and ICTA signed a technical cooperation agreement to operationalise the project. Eight days later, ICTA wrote to Nightigale informing it that it had won a Sh54.3 million tender for “Digital superhighway – Backbone & Metro.” Nightigale acknowledged the award on April 27. Two days after that, on April 29, 2023, Mary Wambui chaired the CA board meeting that ratified the ICTA memorandum of understanding, approved the technical cooperation agreement, and signed off on the Sh5 billion Universal Service Fund budget that would pay for the very contracts her daughter’s company had just been told it had won.
It was only on June 19, 2023, one week before Nightigale signed the contract, that Evelyn Nyambura resigned as director and transferred her 700 shares to Ruth Waithira.
In her resignation letter, dated that same day, Nyambura wrote that she had voluntarily resigned and transferred all her shares to “Ruth Waithira Kinyanjui, a director and shareholder of the company.” Nightigale signed the Backbone & Metro contract a week later, on June 26, 2023.
Cofek’s petition goes further than the timeline of resignations. It states that as late as May 29, 2024, after bids had been submitted but before final awards in some workstreams, Evelyn Nyambura still held a 70 percent stake in Nightigale, and that her removal coincided with Ruth Waithira’s holding jumping to 90 percent. Cofek has characterised this as a deliberate structuring of beneficial ownership designed to create the appearance of distance while keeping control within the family circle.
What The CA Says, And Why It Does Not Settle The Matter
To be fair to the institutions involved, the Communications Authority has not been silent.
In court filings responding to Cofek’s petition for Wambui’s removal, CA Director-General David Mugonyi maintained that neither Wambui nor the CA were engaged in the procurement process at any point and that the authority had no expectation of foreknowledge regarding Nightigale’s participation in a tender run by a different agency, ICTA. Solicitor-General Shadrack Mose offered a similar defence, noting that the tenders were processed through open national tendering and that execution happened directly between ICTA and the winning contractors.
Mugonyi has also disputed the characterisation of Wambui and her daughter as directors of Nightigale “as at April 2023,” telling the court that the Companies Registry informed him in writing that Evelyn Nyambura remained a director and shareholder only until June 2023, after which her shares were transferred. Nightigale’s own chief executive, Edward Njenga Muniu, wrote to ICTA in August 2024 confirming the same dates: Mary Mungai out on December 5, 2022, Evelyn Nyambura out on June 19, 2023.
These defences establish a fact that nobody disputes: the formal paperwork was tidied up before the contract was signed. What they do not establish is that the timing was coincidental. The Auditor-General, working from the same CR12 records and board member resumes that the CA itself submitted for audit, reached the opposite conclusion about what those dates mean for conflict of interest at the point of tender evaluation, which is the legally operative moment under procurement law, not the moment of contract execution. Mugonyi, asked for comment on the fresh AG finding, declined to discuss it, citing the sub judice rule given that Cofek’s petition remains before the High Court.
A Pattern That Predates The Fibre Optic Story
For anyone conducting due diligence on Mary Wambui, and her own court papers say plenty of people are doing exactly that, the Nightigale finding does not arrive in isolation. It lands on top of an already crowded file.
In December 2021, Wambui and her daughter Purity Njoki Mungai, both directors of Purma Holdings Limited, were charged at the Anti-Corruption Court with eight counts of tax evasion totalling Sh2,231,789,125, arising from government supply contracts for boots, uniforms, cereals and medical items sold to the military, KEMSA and other state agencies. When KRA first summoned her in June 2021, she did not appear. When investigators moved to arrest her in December 2021, she was tracked to Weston Hotel, a property publicly associated with then-Deputy President Ruto, and left before she could be apprehended, leaving behind an identity card, bank cards, a firearms licence and a travel permit. A separate charge of illegal possession of a pistol and ammunition followed in January 2022.
Both cases ended the same way. The firearms charge was dropped in December 2022. The tax case was withdrawn on January 10, 2023, after what court papers describe as a compounding of offences and payment of fines, the details of which, including the final amount paid, have never been made public. The sequence of dates is not in dispute: Ruto appointed Wambui CA chairperson on December 2, 2022; the firearms case was dropped that same month; the Sh2.2 billion tax case was withdrawn five weeks after the appointment.
Months later, in 2023, then-Trade Cabinet Secretary Moses Kuria disclosed in Senate testimony that Purma Holdings had been awarded Kenya National Trading Corporation contracts for 30,000 metric tonnes of rice, 12,500 tonnes of edible oil and 20,000 tonnes of beans. KNTC Managing Director Lucy Anangwe later testified that Purma was paid Sh3.9 billion for rice with an actual market value of Sh3.1 billion, an Sh800 million markup.
Combined with the edible oil and beans contracts, Purma’s KNTC exposure alone reached roughly Sh9.8 billion. Three other entities with documented links to Wambui’s network, Charma Holdings, Enterprise Supplies Ltd and Evertec General Trading Company, picked up additional KNTC contracts worth hundreds of millions. The EACC opened an investigation. Former KNTC boss Pamela Mutua was charged. None of Wambui’s companies were.
In 2024, the Directorate of Criminal Investigations froze bank accounts linked to her companies over the KNTC contracts, a freeze that, by Wambui’s own account in later court filings, contributed to her difficulty servicing an Sh8.267 billion loan from Equity Bank secured against Glee Hotel, her 211-room property on the Northern Bypass.
The Glee Hotel Debt: From Sh8.2 Billion To A Sh100 Million Lifeline
The Glee Hotel.
The Glee Hotel saga has, in the months since, become a parallel public spectacle. In January 2026, Equity Bank moved to auction the hotel after Wambui and Glee Hotel Ltd defaulted on loans totalling Sh8.267 billion. Court filings show Wambui offered Sh5 billion in full settlement, which the bank rejected, then raised the offer to Sh7 billion, which the bank also rejected. A November 2025 letter from her camp, not marked “without prejudice,” according to Equity Bank’s filings, has been treated by the bank as an admission of the debt.
The dispute has run through multiple court rounds since.
By February 2026, the parties had recorded a consent under which Equity Bank agreed to accept Sh7.75 billion in full and final settlement, roughly 85 percent of the total owed, financed through a refinancing arrangement with KCB Bank, payable within 45 days.
When that window lapsed, Wambui returned to court seeking another 60 days. As of this week, a High Court judge has given her a narrower lifeline: a Sh100 million deposit within seven days, failing which the suspension of Equity Bank’s right to auction the property, including the Glee Hotel land in Runda and other parcels in Westlands, South B, Ruiru, Thindigua, Ruaka and Ongata Rongai on which her daughters are listed as guarantors, lapses automatically. It is not yet clear whether the payment was made.
The Google Petition, Read Against This Week’s News
It is against this backdrop that Wambui’s Kiambu High Court petition against Google has to be read.
Filed seeking suppression of 35 links to coverage of the 2021-2023 tax case, the petition invokes the European “right to be forgotten” doctrine established in the 2014 Google Spain case, section 25 of Kenya’s Data Protection Act, and constitutional protections for dignity, privacy and reputation under Articles 28, 31 and 33.
“International stakeholders who carry out online due diligence encounter the outdated articles and are misled into doubting my integrity and suitability for engagement.” — Mary Wambui Mungai, in court filings
It is, on its face, an argument that the information is true but inconvenient, made in the same week that Kenya’s constitutional audit authority published a finding that adds a new and currently un-litigated allegation to exactly the kind of due diligence file she is asking Google to bury.
Kenya does not have a codified right to be forgotten. The Data Protection Act’s erasure provisions were designed around personal data held by data controllers, not around search engine indexing of public court records and published journalism.
Google Kenya Ltd, for its part, has argued in its filings that it is a separate legal entity providing only sales, marketing and research functions in Kenya, and that it neither owns nor operates the search engine the petition is actually aimed at, Google LLC, which has not filed a replying affidavit. Four of the 35 links Wambui wants suppressed lead to content published by the Kenya Revenue Authority itself.
What The Record Now Shows
Strip away the legal argument over jurisdiction and statutory interpretation, and what is left is a timeline that any competent investor, lender or development partner doing due diligence on Mary Wambui would want laid out in full: a Sh2.2 billion tax prosecution that evaporated through an undisclosed financial settlement five weeks after a presidential appointment; KNTC contracts worth roughly Sh9.8 billion that followed within months, including a court-established Sh800 million rice markup; an Sh8.267 billion bank default now being managed through successive court-ordered partial payments; and, as of this week, an Auditor-General’s finding that a company whose ownership cycled through her daughter and a tight circle of associates, timed precisely around her CA appointment and the tender calendar, took home Sh401.6 million in conflicted digital superhighway contracts in a single financial year.
Cofek’s petition over the Nightigale awards remains before the High Court.
The Auditor-General’s report is now part of the public record for Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to take up. And the Kiambu court’s ruling on whether 35 links documenting how Wambui’s earlier brush with prosecution ended will remain searchable is, as of this week, still pending.
What is not pending is the question of whether the story is over. The Auditor-General’s report answers that for her.
A senior Somali government official remains in custody in Kenya after being charged with allegedly defrauding a Kenyan-Somali businesswoman of $27,000 (about Sh3.5 million) in a suspected fake gold transaction.
Ismael Abubakar Osman, also known as Ismail or Ismael Abukar, is being held at Nairobi’s Industrial Area Remand Prison after prosecutors opposed his release on bail, citing concerns that he poses a flight risk.
The prosecution also told the court that he is linked to ongoing terrorism-related investigations brought against him.
According to court documents, Osman, a Somali citizen who serves as a Senior Environmental Health and Climate Change Adviser in Somalia’s Ministry of Health and Human Services, allegedly obtained the money from businesswoman Ayan Said Isaak on or around June 29, 2025.
Prosecutors claim he falsely represented that he would supply her with 180 grammes of what was described as “Singaporean gold,” despite knowing that no such transaction would take place.
Osman appeared before Makadara Principal Magistrate Gilbert Shikwe and was charged with obtaining money by false pretences contrary to Section 313 of the Penal Code.
The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions opposed his release on bond, arguing that he was arrested while allegedly attempting to leave the country through Garissa on his way to Somalia.
Prosecutors maintained that the circumstances surrounding his arrest raise concerns that he may fail to attend future court proceedings if released.
The case has attracted attention because of Osman’s position within the Somali government.
While the allegations remain before the court and have not been proven, the matter has triggered discussion about accountability and integrity among public officials in the region.
The prosecution’s reference to alleged links with ongoing security investigations has added another dimension to the case.
However, details of those claims have not been made public.
The allegations emerge against a backdrop of persistent gold-related fraud cases across East Africa.
Authorities have repeatedly warned investors and traders about criminal networks that use forged documents, fake mineral certificates, and non-existent gold consignments to lure victims into making advance payments.
Kenya has for years grappled with fraudulent gold schemes targeting local and foreign investors, with many cases involving promises of lucrative returns from purported precious metal transactions that ultimately fail to materialise.
Investigators are continuing with inquiries as the criminal proceedings move forward. The court is expected to rule on Osman’s bail application on Monday.
The outcome of the case is likely to be closely watched in both Kenya and Somalia, given the cross-border nature of the allegations and Osman’s role within the Somali government.
NAIROBI, Kenya — Lawyer Conrad Anangwe Maloba has secured a temporary reprieve after the High Court extended conservatory orders barring his arrest and prosecution in connection with a high-profile gold fraud investigation involving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Justice Bahati Mwamuye, sitting in Kiambu, extended the orders pending delivery of a judgment scheduled for next month, allowing Maloba and members of his law firm to remain shielded from criminal proceedings for now.
The court also granted the Law Society of Kenya additional time to determine whether it will participate in the case, which has attracted significant attention within legal circles because it touches on the limits of criminal investigations involving advocates acting for clients.
Maloba moved to court after being targeted by investigators over an alleged gold fraud scheme linked to funds that passed through his law firm’s accounts. He argues that his role was strictly professional and limited to managing money held in trust for a client.
The advocate maintains that his firm was instructed by Dubai-based company Sakina Commodities FZCO to hold USD 495,000 in an escrow arrangement and that the firm only received USD 10,000 as legal fees. According to court filings, he insists neither he nor his firm participated in negotiating, facilitating or executing the underlying gold transaction.
He further argues that all payments were processed pursuant to written instructions from the client and that the dispute stems from a legitimate advocate-client relationship rather than any criminal conduct.
The legal battle follows a dramatic series of events that saw Maloba arrested and held in custody before obtaining court orders securing his release.
He was later re-arrested on May 9 and presented before the Milimani Law Courts for plea taking, but the proceedings were halted after the High Court intervened and issued orders suspending the intended prosecution.
In his petition, Maloba contends that investigators are improperly using the criminal justice system to resolve what is essentially a professional dispute.
He has also pointed out that no complaint has been lodged against him before the Advocates Complaints Commission or the Advocates Disciplinary Tribunal, arguing that the continued pursuit of criminal charges is therefore unjustified.
The Director of Public Prosecutions, however, has strongly opposed the application. DPP Renson Igonga told the court that the petition is misconceived, filed in bad faith and amounts to an abuse of the judicial process intended to derail lawful investigations and prosecution.
Investigators have similarly defended their actions. In an affidavit filed before the court, Directorate of Criminal Investigations officer George Karanja said Maloba had failed to demonstrate that he would be denied a fair trial or that any prosecution against him would violate the law.
According to investigators, the case originated from a complaint lodged on March 24, 2026, by Andrew Adel Gaballa, a director of Sakina Commodities FZCO. Gaballa alleged that he had fallen victim to offences including obtaining money by false pretences, conspiracy to defraud and money laundering.
The complaint formed part of a broader investigation into suspected fake gold transactions that have continued to draw scrutiny from Kenyan authorities.
Recent investigations by the DCI have uncovered multiple international gold scams involving foreign investors, escrow accounts and allegations of money laundering, highlighting the growing pressure on authorities to crack down on fraud networks operating through purported gold export deals. (The Star (https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2026-02-18-dci-arrests-suspect-in-multi-million-gold-fraud-inquiry-in-nairobi?utm_source=chatgpt.com))
The dispute has emerged against the backdrop of increasing complaints from foreign investors who claim to have lost millions of shillings in fraudulent gold transactions in Kenya. Several cases under investigation this year involve allegations that victims were persuaded to wire funds into accounts presented as escrow facilities before promised gold shipments failed to materialise. (The Standard (https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/national/article/2001544987/dubai-based-australian-loses-sh78-million-in-nairobi-fake-gold-scam?utm_source=chatgpt.com))
For now, Maloba remains protected by the court orders as he awaits a crucial ruling that could determine whether prosecutors will be allowed to proceed with criminal charges or whether the dispute will remain within the realm of professional and commercial litigation.
The High Court’s judgment next month is expected to provide important guidance on where the line should be drawn between an advocate’s professional obligations and potential criminal liability when handling client funds in high-value commercial transactions.
The morning of October 13, 2015, Kenyans arrived at Imperial Bank branches across the country to find the doors locked. The Central Bank of Kenya had placed the lender under the management of the Kenya Deposit Insurance Corporation overnight, citing unsafe and unsound conditions rooted in what would eventually be described as a decade-long embezzlement scheme.
Behind those locked doors, the savings of an estimated 50,000 depositors small traders, insurance companies, farmers’ cooperatives, pensioners were frozen. They would wait years, and many still have not received everything they are owed.
What the official narrative of that morning did not immediately tell was that nine days before the doors shut, over three-quarters of a billion shillings had already left the building. The money belonged to Simba Corporation. Adil Popat’s company. The brother of the man then running the bank.
This is the story that has never been fully told.
THE EMPIRE AND THE BANK: A FAMILY TRIANGLE
To understand the Imperial Bank saga, you must first understand the Popat family and the architecture of its wealth. Abdulkarim Chatur Popat, born in 1925 to Indian migrants, started selling used cars on Nairobi’s Koinange Street in 1948 under the name Deluxe Motors Ltd. By 1968 he had secured the Mitsubishi franchise and renamed the operation Simba Motors. By the time of his death in March 2013 at age 87, he had built one of Kenya’s most formidable family business empires, estimated at the time at approximately Sh4 billion, with interests spanning motor vehicle distribution and assembly, luxury hospitality, real estate and financial services.
He also invested in a commercial bank. Imperial Bank, founded in part by the Popat family, was conceived — according to public accounts from the period — as a vehicle to extend asset financing to vehicle buyers, deepening the commercial loop that Simba’s motor business depended upon. It was, in that sense, not merely an investment but an embedded instrument of the broader corporate strategy.
Upon Abdulkarim’s death, the three sons took different paths through the empire. Adil, who had studied at the University of Washington and earned an MBA from the Wharton School of Business, had joined the family business in 1994 as Finance Director and became CEO in 2007. He took the corporate crown. Alnashir, the estranged middle child who had been excluded from his father’s will in a bitter testament to a relationship their court battle would later describe as damaged from childhood, remained connected to the bank. He served as Imperial Bank chairman, sitting atop its board when the institution imploded. Azim, the eldest, had his own orbit, eventually migrating to Canada after a separate succession dispute.
The three brothers and the businesses around them were not, whatever the public statements suggested, entirely separate universes.
“The records at Imperial Bank show that between October 1, 7, 8 and 9, 2015 when Alnashir Popat, as chairman, was in charge of running the bank a total of Sh729,057,404 was withdrawn by Simba Corporation in circumstances that suggest directors were misusing insider information.” — KDIC Receiver Manager Mohamud Ahmed, court filings
THE WITHDRAWAL: NINE DAYS, FOUR TRANCHES, SH729 MILLION
Imperial Bank managing director Abdulmalek Janmohammed died suddenly in September 2015. The exact circumstances of his death have never been fully explained in the public domain, and Alnashir Popat himself later objected vigorously in court to the KDIC receiver manager’s characterisation of it as ‘unexplained and convenient.’ But the effect of Janmohammed’s death was immediate and structural: it left Alnashir Popat, as board chairman, as the effective day-to-day overseer of the institution.
What followed in those weeks, as forensic investigators from the American firm FTI Consulting were quietly beginning to work through the bank’s records under Central Bank supervision, is documented in court papers filed by KDIC receiver manager Mohamud Ahmed in proceedings involving Sandview Properties and Upperview Properties — two companies co-owned by Janmohammed’s estate and certain Imperial directors including, notably, Alnashir Popat himself.
Between October 1 and October 9, 2015, Simba Corporation executed four separate withdrawals from one of 29 accounts it maintained at Imperial Bank. The total: Sh729,057,404. The Central Bank moved to place the institution under receivership on October 13. Simba’s withdrawals, all falling within the nine-day window when the bank was operating under its chairman’s personal oversight and before the public knew anything was wrong, amounted to one of the cleanest exits in the collapse’s documented history.
Receiver manager Ahmed was direct in his court filings. The manner of withdrawal, he said, was consistent with either insider tipping that someone at the bank, with knowledge of the impending collapse, had warned Simba to move its money or deliberate cushioning of a related party in advance of the institution’s seizure. Neither scenario was benign. Both pointed to the same question: how did a company controlled by the chairman’s brother move three-quarters of a billion shillings out of a dying bank in precise tranches over nine days, while ordinary depositors had no idea what was about to happen?
Simba Corporation had previously stated publicly, through executive director Dinesh Kotecha, that Standard Chartered and Citibank were the group’s primary bankers, and that there were no related-party transactions between Simba and Imperial Bank. The FTI forensic findings, as introduced in evidence through KDIC court submissions, complicated that position considerably.
THE GHOST ACCOUNTS AND THE CROSSED-OUT NAME
FTI Consulting’s forensic team processed 1.2 terabytes of transaction data. They isolated 700 suspicious accounts and flagged more than 22,520 doubtful transactions spanning what they characterised as a decade-long embezzlement ultimately attributed primarily to Janmohammed and his senior management circle, including managers Naeem Shah and James Kaburu. The total losses to depositors were eventually put at Sh44.9 billion, representing more than half the bank’s deposit base.
The architecture of the fraud involved fictitious and nominee accounts ghost accounts opened under invented or third-party names to receive and redirect stolen funds. These accounts were used to move money outside normal banking controls, with authorisations provided through handwritten chits rather than standard documentation, a system that allowed senior insiders to direct large transfers without creating the paper trail that legitimate banking operations require.
Among the fictitious accounts documented in KDIC pleadings were three that the receiver manager linked to Simba Corporation’s transactions: accounts held in the names B Mohamed, M Khan and Jignesh Shah. FTI identified 12 suspicious transfers totalling Sh190 million connected to this cluster, some involving direct wiring of funds from Simba’s Standard Chartered accounts into these fictitious Imperial Bank accounts. In some instances, money was transferred first into one of Simba’s own Imperial Bank accounts and subsequently redirected into the fictitious names.
One document stood out even in that mass of material. A savings withdrawal form dated March 20, 2013 notably, the same month and year that Abdulkarim Popat died, leaving the family succession dynamics in flux listed ‘B Mohamed’ in the name field. Forensic examination showed that ‘Mr and Mrs Adil Popat’ had originally been written there and then crossed out. The form bore Adil Popat’s signature. Attached to it was a handwritten chit addressed to ‘NS’ the initials understood to refer to senior manager Naeem Shah — written in handwriting the KDIC attributed to Janmohammed himself. Receiver manager Ahmed additionally identified four further transactions linking Adil Popat, Simba Colt Motors and the fictitious B Mohamed account.
Adil Popat has not been charged with any criminal offence in connection with Imperial Bank. The core fraud was attributed in FTI’s findings and in litigation to Janmohammed’s inner circle. What the forensic record establishes, however, is a clear documented connection between Simba’s transactions, the fictitious account infrastructure that served the fraud, and the handwriting of the bank’s managing director. The question of whether that connection was knowing or incidental has never been fully adjudicated in public.
“B Mohamed is written in the name field for a savings withdrawal dated March 20, 2013 but it is evident that Mr and Mrs Adil Popat was written and then crossed out. This form was signed by Adil Popat.” — KDIC Receiver Manager, court affidavit
THE GHOST ACCOUNTS AND THE CROSSED-OUT NAME
Alnashir Popat’s response to the KDIC’s allegations in the Sandview and Upperview litigation was categorical. He argued the references were diversionary, designed to muddy the waters in proceedings whose actual subject was the properties companies’ claims against the bank. He described as ‘scandalous’ the receiver manager’s characterisation of Janmohammed’s death as unexplained and convenient. His legal team argued that the documents relied upon by the receiver had not been properly produced before the court.
The Sandview and Upperview litigation itself illuminated a separate layer of entanglement. Those two companies which owned buildings housing Imperial Bank branches in Upper Hill, Nairobi and Mombasa were co-owned by the estate of the deceased managing director and by certain Imperial directors including Alnashir Popat himself. Their suit against the receiver was, at one level, a demand for access to financial records held in the bank’s offices; at another, it was a vehicle through which the KDIC’s most detailed public disclosures about the Simba connection emerged.
A Court of Appeal judgment issued in May 2025 Civil Appeal E395 of 2017, pitting Imperial Bank in receivership against Alnashir Popat and 18 others — confirmed the continuation of proceedings in which the appellants sought, among other remedies, the transfer of shares held by respondents in 42 linked companies toward recovery of the Sh42.2 billion the KDIC attributed to directorial breach of fiduciary duty. That case remained live as of the date of this publication. Alnashir Popat was the first-named respondent.
THE DEPOSITORS LEFT BEHIND
While Simba Corporation’s withdrawal was precise and its timing fortunate, the 50,000 depositors who did not have advance notice experienced a different story. Their money was locked inside an institution in receivership, and the journey to recovery would stretch across years and arrive incomplete.
The Kenya Power and Lighting Company lost deposits. The National Social Security Fund, the insurer Sanlam, and CIC Insurance were among those caught. Small traders, professionals, and families people whose savings were their operating capital, their school fees money, their medical reserves had no ability to move before the gates closed. Court records from the receivership period include accounts of depositors who could not access funds for medical treatment.
The KDIC initially guaranteed only deposits up to Sh100,000, covering a large proportion of account-holders by number but not by value. Recovery came in slow tranches. KCB Bank reached a deal in 2019 and 2020 to acquire assets and liabilities worth Sh3.2 billion, payable over four years, pushing cumulative recovery at that point to roughly 37.3 percent of eligible deposits. By 2021, approximately 45,700 depositors 92 percent of account-holders had been paid in full, but those were overwhelmingly the smaller depositors. Around 4,300 depositors with larger balances remained in the queue. The CBK directed liquidation in 2021 and KDIC resumed payments in 2023 under the liquidation framework, inviting remaining depositors to file proof-of-debt claims.
The fundamental mathematics of the collapse remained brutal. Of a deposit base of approximately Sh70.9 billion that the KDIC treated as eligible, cumulative recovery through all mechanisms had reached approximately 40 to 55 percent by successive estimates, with the Sh36 billion in outstanding loan balances the bulk of the remaining assets tied up in litigation that continued to delay final resolution. For depositors with large balances, the wait continued into a second decade.
Simba Corporation’s accounts, by contrast, were cleared before the receiver arrived.
THE EMPIRE THAT KEPT GROWING
In the years since October 2015, Simba Corporation has not merely survived. It has expanded on a trajectory that is difficult to reconcile with the image of a company caught in the crossfire of a banking scandal. Adil Popat’s public persona in this period has been that of a progressive industrialist and responsible entrepreneur, and the mainstream business press has largely accepted and reproduced that framing.
The motor business deepened. Simba Colt Motors retains the Mitsubishi franchise alongside Renault and Mahindra. Bavaria Auto handles BMW distribution. Xylon Motors carries the Mahindra commercial range. The Avis car rental franchise adds a leasing dimension. The group’s subsidiary Associated Vehicle Assemblers, operating from its Mombasa plant, has become the single most dominant vehicle assembler in Kenya, currently accounting for 43 percent of all assembled vehicles in the country and operating lines for 23 brands. In January 2022, Simba delivered 100 brand-new Mahindra Scorpio pick-up trucks to the National Police Service under a presidential fleet modernisation initiative. The Kenya Police leasing relationship with government agencies paying for new vehicles from a company whose chairman was being named in billion-shilling fraud recovery proceedings illustrates the elasticity of institutional memory in Kenya’s public procurement culture.
The hospitality portfolio is anchored by the Villa Rosa Kempinski in Nairobi’s Westlands, a five-star property that has hosted heads of state, multinational summits and diplomatic events. The Olare Mara Kempinski in the Maasai Mara and the Acacia Premier in Kisumu complete the hospitality footprint. The Kempinski brand, a European luxury operator, has provided international respectability that the domestic Imperial Bank associations rarely penetrate.
The latest expansion announced in June 2026 involves a Sh1 billion investment in a dedicated electric vehicle assembly line at the Mombasa AVA facility, described as self-funded from group resources without external debt. The investment is timed to capture substantial government tax incentives: EV assemblers are exempt from the 35 percent import duty on fully built units, and the government has cut excise duty on EVs from 20 percent to 10 percent while granting VAT exemption. Simba Corp also supplies MG electric vehicles the British-heritage brand now owned by Chinese state manufacturer SAIC Motor to Kenya Power, a state-owned utility. Simba Corp sold Kenya Power a Sh34.4 million vehicle batch under a 2019 supply contract, and subsequent EV deliveries have continued to build that government-client relationship.
The pattern is consistent across the decade: while legal proceedings, asset freeze applications and KDIC recovery suits named Alnashir Popat as first defendant in a case seeking recovery of Sh42.2 billion, Adil Popat’s side of the same family and the corporation their father built continued to access government contracts, tax concessions, state-owned enterprises as clients and presidential recognition. The two spheres one mired in litigation, the other gathering accolades share the same founding bloodline, the same building on Mombasa Road, and, according to forensic evidence introduced in court, the same bank accounts.
POLITICAL ACCESS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF INFLUENCE
Adil Popat does not hold elected office. His political influence operates through a different architecture: institutional membership, advisory roles and the quiet leverage of a company that sells vehicles to government agencies, assembles cars under national policy frameworks and sits on the boards of the country’s premier private sector bodies.
Simba Corporation is a member of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance, Kenya Association of Manufacturers, Kenya Motor Industry Association and the Federation of Kenya Employers. KEPSA, the apex private sector body, serves as the primary channel through which Kenya’s business community shapes economic policy and engages successive administrations. It helped draft the Vision 2030 blueprint and played a role in post-election stabilisation processes. Membership at Simba’s scale carries access to pre-budget consultations, policy input mechanisms and the ministerial-level engagements through which regulations governing the motor and assembly industries are shaped.
Adil Popat himself served as chairman of KMI, the Kenya Motor Industry Association, from 2012 to 2015 the same period during which the Imperial Bank fraud was at its peak, and during which, according to the savings withdrawal form introduced in KDIC proceedings, his signature appeared on a document linked to a fictitious account. He has served as a member of the Wharton School’s EMEA Board for more than nine years, advising the institution on African affairs. That connection to an elite American institution adds an international legitimacy layer that further insulates the domestic corporate reputation.
When President Uhuru Kenyatta’s administration launched its manufacturing-sector push under the ‘Big Four’ agenda and introduced the tax incentives for local vehicle assemblers, AVA and Simba Corporation were positioned to be among the primary beneficiaries. President Kenyatta personally attended the launch of Mahindra assembly at AVA and praised the company’s investment. The government’s electric vehicle policy framework, developed during the Ruto administration, has continued to create preferential conditions from which the group’s new EV assembly line will benefit directly. The Sh1 billion investment announced in June 2026 is, in material terms, partly a bet on the durability of government policy architecture that Simba Corp has had a sustained hand in influencing.
That is not corruption in any simple definitional sense. But it is a picture of a corporation that has navigated the transition from one administration to the next, maintained access to government procurement through police and utility purchases, shaped industry regulations through trade body membership, and collected tax incentives calibrated to reward exactly the activities it had already committed to pursue. The structural advantage is cumulative and compounding, and it operates largely outside the scrutiny that the Imperial Bank chapter might have triggered in a country with more robust accountability journalism.
THE INHERITANCE WAR AND WHAT IT REVEALS
The succession battle within the Popat family adds a dimension to the portrait that the public relations exercise of Simba Corporation’s annual reports cannot obscure. When Abdulkarim Popat died in March 2013, he left a will that excluded Alnashir entirely. The father had, in his own document, signalled that the second son was not to share in the formal inheritance. Alnashir contested this in court, eventually winning at the Court of Appeal in October 2021 in a ruling that ordered redistribution to provide him a fair share.
The litigation exposed, through affidavit evidence and court record, the emotional and relational underpinnings of the family’s internal dynamics. A letter Alnashir had written to his father in 2009 described by the appellate judges as ’emotional and bitter’ accused the senior Popat of playing favourites with Adil since childhood, of denying Alnashir the paternal love and guidance he had given freely to his preferred son. The fourth son, Azim, had migrated to Canada in what the court described as an effort to escape the unfavourable family situation blamed on Adil’s influence.
The relevance to the Imperial Bank story is not sentimental but structural. Alnashir Popat, the son left out of the will and excluded from Simba Corporation’s inner circle, was the one who ended up as chairman of the bank. He was the one sitting in the chair when Janmohammed died. He was the one whose name appears as first defendant in the KDIC’s Sh42.2 billion recovery suit. And he was the one whose company contacts and oversight created the conditions whether knowingly or not under which his brother’s corporation moved three-quarters of a billion shillings out in nine days.
Adil, the son who inherited the father’s favoured status and the operational control of Simba Corporation, emerged from the same catastrophe without criminal charge, without his business operations disrupted, and without any sustained public examination of his company’s documented forensic connections to the fraud infrastructure.
The two brothers’ fates in the aftermath of Imperial Bank’s collapse track almost exactly their respective positions in their father’s affections.
THE REPORT THAT WAS NEVER MADE PUBLIC
Perhaps the most consequential single fact in the entire Imperial Bank saga is this: the FTI Consulting forensic report, which processed 1.2 terabytes of data, identified 700 suspicious accounts, mapped 22,520 doubtful transactions and supplied the evidential backbone for both the receivership and the Sh42.2 billion civil recovery proceedings, has never been released to the public in comprehensive form.
What is known of its contents has emerged piecemeal through adversarial litigation through KDIC affidavits filed in Sandview and Upperview proceedings, through freeze applications against directors’ companies, through the ghost-accounts exposé that entered the Business Daily record in late 2016, and through the layered disclosures introduced as CBK and KDIC pursued recovery across multiple suits. The public has never received a standalone accounting of what went wrong, at whose direction, and who benefited.
That opacity is not accidental. The full report would answer questions that the current partial record leaves open: precisely what role, if any, was Simba Corporation’s management playing in the fictitious account transactions? Were the 12 suspicious transfers totalling Sh190 million the result of Simba’s participation, or was the company’s name used without its knowledge? What did the March 2013 savings withdrawal form, with Adil Popat’s name crossed out and his signature still present, actually evidence about the relationship between Simba and Janmohammed’s fiction infrastructure?
Those questions are answerable, in principle, by the material FTI processed. They remain unanswered in public because the report has been deployed as a litigation instrument rather than a transparency mechanism. The depositors who lost money and whose interests the receivership exists to serve have been denied the full factual accounting they are owed.
THE CHARACTER LEDGER
What does the complete record reveal about Adil Popat as an actor in Kenya’s corporate landscape? It reveals, first, a man of genuine business capability. The transformation of Simba Corporation from a family car dealership into a Sh10 billion-turnover conglomerate employing 1,300 people is not achieved by inheritance alone. The hospitality strategy building two Kempinski-branded properties, establishing a presence in the Maasai Mara luxury tourism market required vision and execution. The move into electric vehicles and the AVA investment in the EV assembly line reflect genuine strategic awareness of where the automotive market is heading.
It also reveals a man who, at a documented moment of institutional crisis in October 2015, appears to have had access to information or conditions that allowed his company to exit a collapsing bank before the public knew the exits would close. The forensic evidence does not establish that he personally directed a fraud. It establishes that his company’s accounts were linked to the fictitious account infrastructure that served the fraud, that his signature appeared on a document bearing a fictitious name with his own name crossed out, and that Sh729 million left his company’s Imperial Bank accounts in the nine days when his brother was running the institution into its final hours.
It reveals a man whose public identity KEPSA member, manufacturer, hospitality leader, EV pioneer has been constructed and maintained with considerable care, and whose name has largely been kept out of the mainstream narrative of one of Kenya’s largest banking collapses despite the forensic record’s clear placement of him within it.
It reveals a man who, in the family succession dispute, fought through his lawyers and aligned brother to exclude Alnashir from the estate, and who, after Alnashir’s bank collapsed and Alnashir became the first-named defendant in billion-shilling recovery proceedings, continued to expand the business that their father had built and left preferentially to Adil.
Kenya’s accountability culture has a well-documented habit of pursuing the obvious and abandoning the structural. Janmohammed is dead. Alnashir Popat is in court. The depositors have been told their money is largely gone. The story, for most of the media that has covered it, ends there. Adil Popat is a successful businessman who runs luxury hotels and assembles electric cars.
The FTI records say something different. The court filings say something different. The savings withdrawal form with the crossed-out name says something different.
The question is not whether those documents, standing alone, constitute a criminal case. They do not. The question is whether, in a country where 50,000 depositors were told to wait a decade to recover half their savings, the businessman whose company moved three-quarters of a billion shillings out of that bank before the doors closed has ever been required to answer publicly, under oath, in a forum where ordinary depositors could hear the response why his name was crossed out on a document linked to a ghost account, and who told him when to leave.
That question has not been put. That answer has not been given. And Simba Corporation is now investing Sh1 billion in its next chapter.
The Wajir North Member of Parliament, Ibrahim Abdi Saney, has expressed displeasure over the 2026/2027 Budget presented by the Treasury Cabinet Secretary.
Speaking during an interview with members of the press on Thursday, June,11,2026 shortly after CS Mbadi read the budget before the National Assembly, the MP accused the Treasury of sidelining Northern Kenya in the country’s development agenda.
On his part, the 2026/2027 Budget has failed to address the needs of Wajir North constituency and the wider Northern region, drawing in the conversation around the exclusion of the region.
“What are they producing? For me, probably there will be good things in the last year. So far, I’m not happy, and I can’t offer even a smile. I’m excluded, marginalised, and yet there’s always the talk of inclusion, which I feel is not honest of them,” Abdi said.
The UDA MP further argued that the budget allocations demonstrated continued exclusion of Northern Kenya from national development priorities despite a recent apology by President William Ruto on the past neglect of the region from development.
“It is just out of it we are further excluded. So this budget is for others, not me. There is nothing for Northern Kenya,” he explained.
A missed call to the North Eastern leaders
At the same time, the legislator accused leaders from the North-Eastern region of failing to stand up to the occasion and demand their rights, warning that the impact shall lead to a long-term marginalisation of the region.
“And until those who represent Northern Kenya rise to the occasion and demand their rights, we will ever be marginalised. The unfortunate thing, MPs from Northern Kenya are silent, sleeping, pretending to be part of this development, when we have nothing for our people,” Abdi stated.
“This is budget for south of the equator, nothing for the north of the equator, nothing for Wajir North,” he added.
President William Ruto waving at the crowd during Madaraka feter in Wajir.
Ruto’s apology to Wajir
Meanwhile, his concerns come just under a month after President Ruto issued a formal apology to Northern Kenyans for what he termed decades of historical marginalisation and economic neglect.
Speaking during the Madaraka Day celebration at the Wajir Stadium in Wajir County on Monday, June 1, 2026, President Ruto said that the people of northern Kenya have long been subjected to decades of historical marginalisation and economic neglect, committing to them that this is going to be a thing of the past.
“Decades after independence, this region was left behind. Fellow citizens, I want to tell you that on behalf of the people of Kenya today, as I stand HERE as president and leader of our great nation, to the people of Kenya in northern Kenya for this marginalisation, I want to apologise on behalf of the nation of Kenya,” Ruto said.
Reflecting on the historical trajectory of the nation, President Ruto emphasised that the celebration was far more than an exercise in public relations.
Instead, he framed the occasion as a structural turning point for how the Kenyan state interacts with its northern frontier.
“It is not a mere ceremonial gesture; it is a national declaration, it is a moment of affirmation that Madaraka, our freedom, our dignity, and our self-determination were never meant for some Kenyans, never meant for some region and withheld for others,” Ruto added.
On the morning of June 11, 2026, a court filing quietly landed at the High Court’s Human Rights Division in Nairobi that told you everything you needed to know about the current psychological state of one of Kenya’s most celebrated investment bankers.
John Ngumi Oxford-educated, 35-year career banker, parastatal chairman, presidential confidant, and self-described ‘best in the business’ has petitioned the High Court to declare the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission’s ongoing investigation into his role in the Telkom Kenya buyback unconstitutional, unlawful, and oppressive.
He wants every inquiry terminated.
Every watchlist lifted. A permanent injunction barring EACC from ever reopening the file. And, for good measure, damages for the emotional distress and reputational injury he says the continued probe has inflicted upon him.
For a man who once told Parliament he could have charged ten million US dollars for five months of advisory work, the image of John Ngumi seeking constitutional sanctuary from accountability investigators tells its own story.
Innocent men do not race to court demanding that scrutiny be permanently enjoined. Innocent men testify. They open their books. They welcome the audit trail. They do not spend three years exhausting every procedural avenue available under Kenya’s legal architecture to ensure the investigators never get the chance to look too closely.
This is the story behind the story the one that mainstream coverage, constrained by advertiser relationships, political proximity, and the natural laziness of reporters who accept official denials as closure, has barely grazed.
It is the story of what Ngumi’s file actually contains, why the DPP’s earlier pass was not the exoneration it was marketed as, what EACC can still do even without a criminal prosecution, what Ngumi has spent three years trying to prevent investigators from discovering, and why the full picture of this man’s career at the intersection of public power and private capital should alarm every Kenyan who has ever wondered how the country’s strategic assets keep changing hands through layered offshore vehicles with suspiciously well-remunerated intermediaries.
“I was paid the money because I was the best in the business.” — John Ngumi, to Parliament, April 19, 2023
THE TRANSACTION THAT STARTED IT ALL
The facts of the Telkom Kenya buyback are no longer seriously in dispute. In August 2022 specifically on August 5, four days before the general election that would usher out the Kenyatta administration the National Treasury wired Sh6.09 billion to Jamhuri Holdings Limited, a Mauritius-registered special purpose vehicle that served as the investment vehicle for UK-based private equity firm Helios Investment Partners, in exchange for Helios’s 60 percent stake in Telkom Kenya.
The transaction made Telkom Kenya fully state-owned for the first time since privatisation, in a reversal that had significant national security justifications Telkom controls critical government data infrastructure including data centres, carrier services, landing stations, undersea cables, and meet-me rooms where telecommunications companies connect to each other.
There was, however, a problem. Several problems.
The National Treasury had disbursed Sh6.09 billion without parliamentary approval, in apparent violation of Public Finance Management Regulations that require legislative sanction for such expenditures outside certified emergency conditions.
The Controller of Budget, Margaret Nyakang’o, had explicitly refused to authorise the release of funds, telling Parliament she was overruled.
The Communications Authority of Kenya, the sector regulator, had not granted final approval for the acquisition because conditions it had set had not been met by Telkom Kenya. No formal Attorney-General opinion was on file. The entire transaction had been executed with an urgency that looked, to any trained eye, less like an unavoidable national security intervention and more like a deal that had to close before a new administration took over and asked questions.
Into this environment, on April 1, 2022 the very same date, it later emerged, that the National Security Council approved the acquisition John Ngumi signed an advisory agreement with Jamhuri Holdings Limited. He was retained by the seller. Not by the government. Not by the buyer. By Helios, through its Mauritius vehicle, to advise on its exit.
By the time the transaction concluded in September 2022, Ngumi had received $3.07 million approximately Sh415 million at prevailing exchange rates, making him the single largest individual beneficiary in the entire transaction, surpassing the amount Jamhuri Holdings itself received and dwarfing the Sh54 million paid to the transaction lawyers.
THE NAIROBI PROPERTIES AND THE COASTAL RETREAT
What EACC investigators found when they began tracing the movement of Ngumi’s $3.07 million is what keeps the file alive and what Ngumi most urgently needs shut down.
According to reporting by the Daily Nation citing materials in the EACC investigation, multi-million shilling assets in Nairobi and a beach property on the Coast were among the acquisitions made using the advisory proceeds.
This is the part of the story that never made it into the parliamentary hearings, where the committee’s questioning was largely restricted to the value-for-money question and the post-facto tax payment.
Kenya’s EACC has broad civil asset recovery powers under the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission Act and the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act. A DPP declination on criminal prosecution does not extinguish these powers. The commission can still pursue civil recovery proceedings against assets it believes represent unexplained wealth or proceeds of suspected corrupt conduct. It can issue asset preservation orders.
It can conduct mutual legal assistance requests to Mauritius where Jamhuri Holdings was domiciled and where the initial payment is likely to have been routed to trace the full chain of transactions from the Treasury disbursement to Ngumi’s accounts. This is precisely what Ngumi’s petition describes as the ‘indefinite and unconcluded investigative process’ that he finds so intolerable.
The Mauritius routing is particularly significant. Jamhuri Holdings was structured as an offshore SPV a legal architecture that provides layers of opacity between the underlying investors and the actual financial flows. Payments to Ngumi from such a vehicle would have passed through offshore accounts before landing in Kenya.
Tracing that route requires international cooperation that takes time, political will, and an open investigative file.
If Ngumi succeeds in getting the High Court to close the file permanently, that international cooperation track dies with it. That is the practical consequence his petition is designed to achieve.
A DPP declination does not extinguish EACC’s civil recovery powers, its asset-tracing mandate, or its ability to make mutual legal assistance requests to Mauritius.
THE CONFLICT OF INTEREST ARCHITECTURE NO ONE HAS FULLY MAPPED
The central integrity question in the Telkom deal is not simply about the size of Ngumi’s fee. It is about the extraordinary concentration of relevant positions he held simultaneously and the questions about whose interests were actually being served when he collected that $3.07 million.
Ngumi was, at various points in the period surrounding the transaction, the non-executive chairman of Safaricom Kenya’s dominant telecommunications operator and Telkom’s direct competitor in the broadband and enterprise data market; a non-executive director at the Communications Authority of Kenya, the very regulatory body whose approval was required for the acquisition and which EACC found did not give final sign-off because conditions precedent remained unmet; the chairman of Kenya Pipeline Company, a strategic state infrastructure asset; and the chairman of the Industrial and Commercial Development Corporation (ICDC), the state holding vehicle overseeing Kenya Ports Authority, KPC, and Kenya Railways.
His Eagle Africa Capital Partners was retained by the seller of a strategic national asset, advising on an exit from a company that directly interfaced with government security infrastructure.
The inaugural directorship at the Communications Authority of Kenya then the Communications Commission of Kenya is the detail that has never received the scrutiny it deserves. Ngumi sat on the regulator’s founding board.
He helped shape the regulatory frameworks that govern Kenya’s telecommunications market. He built relationships inside the institution that has survived across multiple administrations.
When the Telkom deal required Communications Authority approval, and when that approval was apparently navigated around or left incomplete, the question of what role Ngumi’s institutional knowledge and relationships may have played in that navigation is precisely the kind of question that an open EACC file preserves the ability to ask. A permanently enjoined investigation cannot ask it.
There is also the Safaricom dimension. Ngumi was appointed Safaricom’s board chairman on August 1, 2022 the same month the Treasury wired Sh6.09 billion to his client, Helios, to buy a 60 percent stake in Safaricom’s direct competitor.
He resigned from Safaricom’s board on December 22, 2022, barely five months into the role, in circumstances that insiders described as politically driven by the incoming Ruto administration’s desire to clean house.
He had also previously served as Helios’s strategic adviser for Kenya and Africa a role that, when combined with his simultaneous advisory mandate to Jamhuri Holdings in the Telkom exit, creates a layered web of competing interests that no major Kenyan institution has been willing to systematically untangle.
THE COMPANY THAT FAILED AND THE PATTERN THAT PERSISTED
Before Ngumi became the dealmaker whose name appeared on trillion-shilling transactions, there was an earlier version of the story that his official biography tends to treat as a footnote. Loita Capital Partners, which he co-founded in 1994 as Kenya’s first indigenous investment bank, collapsed into bankruptcy by 1997. Ngumi has spoken openly about the personal financial devastation that followed mortgaging his house three times, borrowing heavily to pay staff, spending three years ‘desperately trying to keep my financial head above water.’ By his own account, he did not fully recover until well into the 2000s.
The Loita bankruptcy matters not because it is evidence of wrongdoing businesses fail, particularly pioneering ones in frontier markets but because of what it reveals about the pattern of recovery.
Ngumi’s rehabilitation from insolvency to the highest levels of parastatal governance and deal-making was entirely dependent on his proximity to political power, specifically to President Uhuru Kenyatta.
It was Kenyatta who appointed him chair of Kenya Pipeline Company in 2015.
Kenyatta who put him at the head of ICDC. Kenyatta who endorsed his placement on the Communications Authority board. Kenyatta whose political context enabled the Safaricom chairmanship, however briefly. And it was during Kenyatta’s final months in office that the Telkom deal was executed and Ngumi emerged from it Sh415 million richer.
This is not coincidence. It is a documented pattern of political dependency dressed up as meritocratic achievement. Ngumi’s insistence before Parliament that he was ‘the best in the business’ and that Helios ‘valued the advice’ he gave is technically not falsifiable advisory fees in private transactions are ultimately a matter of agreement between consenting parties. But the question is not whether Helios agreed to pay him.
The question is why Helios agreed to pay him more than the entire seller’s take from the transaction, more than the lawyers, more than any other single party. The answer that most investigators keep arriving at is not that Ngumi provided advice that no one else in Kenya could have provided.
It is that Ngumi provided access that no one else could have access to the National Security Council deliberations, access to the Communications Authority, access to the Treasury, access to the political machinery that could execute a Sh6 billion transaction in 26 minutes on a Friday in the dying days of an administration.
The question is not whether Helios agreed to pay him. The question is why more than the lawyers, more than the entire seller’s take.
THE EUROBOND GHOST THAT REFUSES TO FADE
The Telkom file is not the first time EACC has had reason to be interested in John Ngumi. In 2014, when Kenya executed its debut $2 billion Eurobond subsequently enlarged to Sh275 billion through a tap sale Ngumi was a central figure as joint lead arranger for Standard Bank Plc alongside Barclays, JP Morgan, and Qatar National Bank.
He was also the spokesperson for the consortium of arranging banks.
The bond became a political flashpoint when then-opposition figures alleged that proceeds had been misappropriated before reaching Kenya, an allegation that was never conclusively resolved in open proceedings.
Many crucial emails during the bond arrangement were under Ngumi’s name, a fact that the Standard newspaper documented when EACC was seeking to understand how Eurobonds are priced and whether the arrangement fees were commercially justified. Ngumi was made a person of interest in that inquiry too. He survived it. But the pattern a major sovereign transaction, a well-connected intermediary, fees that attract regulatory scrutiny, investigations that produce inconclusive outcomes was being established even then.
EACC Headquarters, Integrity Center.
THE ARM CEMENT DIMENSION
Ngumi’s directorship at ARM Cement, to which he was appointed as non-executive director in 2016, adds another layer to the overall picture.
ARM Cement went into receivership in August 2018 with a debt burden of approximately $284 million and was subsequently liquidated a collapse that wiped out shareholders and left creditors deeply exposed.
The company’s implosion remains one of the most significant corporate governance failures in East Africa’s listed company history. The board, of which Ngumi was a member, has never been subjected to the kind of forensic governance examination that the scale of the collapse would ordinarily demand. It is another file that, like the Eurobond, and like the Telkom investigation, appears to have been quietly managed down rather than systematically examined.
THE DPP DECLINATION AND WHAT IT DID NOT MEAN
When the Director of Public Prosecutions declined to institute criminal charges following EACC’s prosecution recommendation in late 2023, Ngumi and his legal team immediately framed it as an exoneration. This characterisation is legally illiterate and factually misleading. A DPP declination means one thing: the DPP, at that moment, with the evidence available to it, concluded that the threshold for a criminal prosecution had not been met or that a conviction was insufficiently probable.
It does not mean the conduct was lawful. It does not mean the money was legitimately earned. It does not mean there was no corruption. It means the DPP made a prosecutorial judgment call one that can be revisited if new evidence emerges, and one that has no bearing whatsoever on EACC’s parallel civil and administrative enforcement powers.
EACC retains, regardless of the DPP position, the ability to pursue civil asset recovery under the Proceeds of Crime and Anti-Money Laundering Act. It can apply to court for a civil forfeiture order without any prior criminal conviction. It can continue to trace the origins, routing, and deployment of funds received by Ngumi through the Mauritius vehicle.
It can debarment-recommend Ngumi from participation in public procurement processes. It can make mutual legal assistance requests to the Government of Mauritius and other relevant jurisdictions.
It can, if new material emerges communications, undisclosed agreements, additional beneficiaries refer the matter back to the DPP with a supplemented file. Every one of these powers is extinguished if the High Court accedes to Ngumi’s petition and permanently closes the file. That is why the petition is significant not just as a legal manoeuvre but as a statement of intent: Ngumi knows the file is not dead, and he is terrified of what a determined investigator with full access to his Mauritius-routed transaction records could still unearth.
THE REVOLVING DOOR AND THE ACCOUNTABILITY VACUUM
What makes the Ngumi case systemic rather than merely individual is the pattern it exemplifies. Post-liberalisation Kenya has produced a class of operators who have turned the boundary between public governance and private dealmaking into a personal revenue stream. The architecture is consistent: acquire regulatory and institutional knowledge through publicly appointed roles; deploy that knowledge to inform advisory mandates for private clients seeking to do business with, sell assets to, or extract concessions from the same state institutions; collect fees that bear no rational relationship to the market price of the specific technical advice provided but a very rational relationship to the market price of insider access; and, when scrutiny comes, invoke procedural arguments, political victimhood narratives, and constitutional rights litigation to run out the clock.
Ngumi’s own career maps this architecture with unusual precision. Communications Authority director knowledge of the regulatory framework governing telecommunications licensing and approvals. Kenya Pipeline Company chairman control over procurement and contract decisions at a strategic energy infrastructure entity.
ICDC chairman oversight of the state’s largest logistics and infrastructure holdings. Konza Technopolis chairman exposure to Kenya’s technology infrastructure development plans and the commercial opportunities they generate. Safaricom board chairman access to the competitive intelligence, network architecture intelligence, and government relationship structures of East Africa’s dominant telecommunications company. Eagle Africa Capital Partners the private vehicle through which all of this accumulated institutional knowledge is monetised.
The money that flows into Eagle Africa Capital Partners from clients who need government doors opened, regulatory approvals navigated, or strategic intelligence provided is, in this architecture, not really advisory income. It is the rent charged for access to a network built entirely on publicly funded institutional positions. The Sh415 million Telkom fee is the most visible and documented example of this rent-extraction. It is almost certainly not the only one.
WHY HE IS REALLY RUNNING
Ngumi’s petition lists reputational damage and emotional distress as the injuries he has suffered from the continued investigation. The reputational damage argument is particularly instructive. His reputation in Kenya’s investment banking community the reputation that generates future mandates, board appointments, and advisory fees depends on the perception that he is above legal reproach.
An open EACC file, even without charges, signals to international institutional investors, development finance institutions, and foreign private equity that doing business with Ngumi carries regulatory risk. It dries up the pipeline. It makes future Jamhuri Holdings-type mandates less available. The petition is, at its core, not a human rights action. It is a business protection measure dressed in constitutional clothing.
But the deeper fear is what an unconstrained investigation might find in the communications trail. Ngumi was retained by Helios on April 1, 2022 the same day the National Security Council approved the acquisition.
This timing has never been adequately explained.
Did Ngumi know in advance that the NSC was meeting that day? Did he have any role in structuring the security justification that was used to move the transaction through without parliamentary approval? What do the internal Eagle Africa communications say about the nature of the advice he was providing? What do the WhatsApp threads, the emails, the phone records say about his interactions with Treasury officials, NSC members, and Communications Authority personnel during the critical weeks when a transaction requiring multiple regulatory approvals was being executed with none of them fully in place?
An EACC with access to Ngumi’s private communications, Eagle Africa’s internal records, and the full Jamhuri Holdings transaction file obtained through a Mauritius mutual legal assistance request could potentially reconstruct, with significant precision, what happened in those five months.
That reconstruction might show exactly what Ngumi provided for his $3.07 million, and it might show that what he provided was not high-level financial advice but high-level political facilitation. That is the file he wants permanently sealed.
THE PETITION AS CONFESSION
Lawyers for accused persons routinely file motions to suppress evidence, challenge jurisdiction, and seek procedural relief. That is the adversarial system working as designed. But there is a category of legal manoeuvre that, by its very nature, functions as an admission of vulnerability rather than an assertion of innocence. Ngumi’s petition belongs to that category.
A man genuinely confident that the investigation would clear him would not demand its permanent termination. He would demand its conclusion. He would submit to questioning, produce his records, demonstrate that his advisory work was legitimate, and allow the commission to close the file through findings rather than through a court injunction.
He has not done this.
Three years after the first anticipatory bail application in 2023, the EACC has not received the full cooperation that its investigators required. The petition is the next escalation in a long-running strategy of procedural obstruction.
That strategy has been partially effective. Each legal intervention has bought time. Each court order has created uncertainty about what investigators are permitted to do. The three-year delay has allowed the political context to shift the incoming Ruto administration that initially appeared willing to prosecute Kenyatta-era deals has progressively made its accommodation with the former president’s network, reducing the political appetite for prosecutions that would embarrass Kenya’s political establishment. Time is Ngumi’s most valuable ally. The petition is an attempt to convert time into permanence.
A man genuinely confident that the investigation would clear him would not demand its permanent termination. He would demand its conclusion.
THE VERDICT OF THE RECORD
John Ngumi is 68 years old. He has spent more than three decades at the apex of Kenyan finance and governance. He has arranged bonds worth hundreds of billions of shillings, chaired some of the country’s most powerful institutions, and built a personal brand that has opened doors no credential alone could have opened.
By the standards of Kenya’s elite, he has had a remarkable career.
But remarkable careers in proximity to state power in Kenya leave traces that do not disappear when the political wind shifts, and the trace that the Telkom transaction has left is one that Ngumi cannot talk his way out of in any forum where hard questions are permitted.
The record shows: an advisory agreement signed the same day as the NSC approval of the transaction he was advising on; a fee of $3.07 million from the seller’s Mauritius vehicle for five months of work that Parliament found unquantifiable; a payment that made him the largest individual beneficiary of a Sh6.09 billion public expenditure conducted without parliamentary approval, without Communications Authority final approval, and without an Attorney-General opinion on file; a post-hoc tax payment of Sh111.9 million made only after parliamentary scrutiny made the optics toxic; two rapid board resignations from Safaricom and Kenya Airways following the investigation’s intensification; an anticipatory bail application in 2023 framed around the threat that investigators would ‘jeopardise his reputation as one of Kenya’s most celebrated bankers’; and now, in June 2026, a petition demanding that EACC be permanently and judicially prevented from ever examining this matter again.
That is not the record of a man at peace with the verdict of scrutiny. It is the record of a man who understood, from the moment the first parliamentary question was asked, that the closer investigators looked, the more uncomfortable the answers would become.
The Sh415 million payday is the headline figure. But the real story is the machinery that produced it the access, the institutional positions, the regulatory knowledge, the political proximity, and the offshore routing that converted five months of advisory work into a fee that dwarfs what most Kenyans earn in a lifetime.
EACC’s persistence, even after the DPP’s earlier pass, is not prosecutorial harassment. It is the institutional manifestation of an unanswered question: what, precisely, did John Ngumi do for $3.07 million, and for whom was he really doing it? Until that question is answered in an open forum where evasion is not a strategic option, the investigation serves a purpose that goes beyond John Ngumi. It signals to the next generation of well-connected intermediaries who stand at the intersection of public governance and private capital that the receipt does not automatically expire.
On June 11, 2026, John Ngumi filed a petition asking the High Court to make the receipt disappear. The court has yet to give directions. Whatever it decides, the filing itself is the clearest public statement Ngumi has made in three years of legal manoeuvring: the questions terrify him, and he will exhaust every instrument available to ensure they are never fully answered.
