On the morning of Tuesday, June 3, 2026, Senior Counsel Nelson Havi took to X, formerly Twitter, and ignited what may prove to be Kenya’s most consequential judicial corruption disclosure in a generation.
His post, terse and loaded with implication, directed its fire at two anonymous judges one sitting at the Supreme Court, another at the High Court whom he and fellow Senior Counsel Philip Murgor had, in a closed-door meeting with Chief Justice Martha Koome, identified as shareholders in the very legal enterprise driving the Sh10 billion enforcement proceedings against the Kenya Electricity Transmission Company.
The case at the centre of this firestorm pits a formally dissolved and bankrupt Spanish company, Instalaciones Inabensa S.A., against a State utility whose 17 bank accounts have been frozen, whose operations have been thrown into paralysis, and whose taxpayers face the unthinkable prospect of paying the same debt up to three times.
That disclosure, coming from two of Kenya’s most credentialed and battle-hardened senior counsel, cannot be dismissed as idle provocation.
Both Havi and Ahmednasir the latter having popularised the term “JurisPesa” as legal shorthand for judicial bribery have for years staked their professional reputations and, in Ahmednasir’s case, their right to appear before the Supreme Court, on the campaign to expose corruption within the judiciary.
They have paid a price for that campaign. What they have now told the Chief Justice in a face-to-face meeting goes beyond rhetoric. It names a pattern. It identifies beneficiaries. It demands a response.
Kenya Insights has reviewed the full paper trail of the KETRACO-Inabensa litigation, spanning seven years and four court levels, and can confirm that the scandal is real, its dimensions are extraordinary, and the fingerprints of institutional manipulation are visible at multiple points in the chain. What follows is a full accounting.
“It is an open secret in legal circles that this case against KETRACO is owned by judges. The majority shareholder is a Supreme Court judge.” — SC Ahmednasir Abdullahi
THE GHOST COMPANY AND THE BALLOONING DEBT
Instalaciones Inabensa S.A. was a subsidiary of Abengoa, the Spanish engineering and energy conglomerate that became one of Spain’s most spectacular corporate collapses. Inabensa specialised in transmission and distribution infrastructure, and in April 2013, following a competitive tender process, it was awarded two engineering, procurement and construction contracts by KETRACO for the 400kV Lessos–Tororo transmission line connecting Kenya to Uganda, and for the extension of the Lessos substation. The combined contract value was approximately Sh4.5 billion, part-financed through an African Development Bank loan.
Within three years, the relationship had collapsed. Inabensa suspended works on April 12, 2016, citing KETRACO’s failure to settle multiple outstanding invoices. KETRACO responded on April 25, 2016, with a termination notice of its own, alleging poor performance and failure to mobilise. The project a critical corridor for regional electricity trade between Kenya and Uganda remained incomplete. It is still incomplete today.
The Lessos–Tororo line, intended to facilitate power exchange between the two countries, stands as a monument to contractual breakdown and the decade of litigation that followed.
An arbitral tribunal convened under the rules of the contract rendered its award on July 30, 2019. It found in favour of Inabensa: KETRACO had breached the contract by failing to pay invoices and by unlawfully terminating the agreement. The award was for more than €30.8 million approximately Sh4.6 billion at the time plus compounding interest and legal costs. KETRACO challenged the award at the High Court, the Court of Appeal, and the Supreme Court. It lost at every single level.
By February 2023, having exhausted every available avenue, KETRACO withdrew its Supreme Court petition. The three-judge bench of Justices Mohammed Ibrahim, Isaac Lenaola and William Ouko ordered KETRACO to bear the costs of the appeal.
By the time of the Supreme Court’s final determination, compounding interest had swollen the original award to over €62.6 million more than Sh10 billion at current exchange rates. That debt is enforceable. The 2019 arbitral award was adopted as a judgment of the High Court on February 12, 2021. It is, in Kenyan law, final.
But the entity attempting to collect that Sh10 billion no longer exists.
A COMPANY DECLARED DEAD IN MADRID
The Attorney General’s office has confirmed, in a confidential advisory reviewed by Kenya Insights, that Instalaciones Inabensa S.A. was declared bankrupt in Spain a mere month after the Supreme Court’s October 2022 ruling. It was subsequently dissolved. Its assets — including its entire portfolio of overseas claims — were absorbed into insolvency proceedings administered by Ernst and Young Abogados, the court-appointed insolvency manager. Some of its assets were tipped for sale to a Spanish company called Cox Energy. Inabensa, as a legal person capable of entering contracts, initiating proceedings, or receiving payment, ceased to exist under Spanish law.
This fact was unknown to Kenyan judges and lawyers at the time they were adjudicating KETRACO’s challenge to the award. It is a damningly relevant fact, and its concealment whether deliberate or inadvertent raises questions that investigators must now pursue.
On July 28, 2023, what the Attorney General describes as a “Deed of Subrogation” was executed, purporting to transfer Inabensa’s rights under the Kenyan decree to a separate Spanish entity: C.A. Infraestructuras T & I SLU.
This entity has never constructed a single metre of transmission line in Kenya.
It was not a party to the original 2013 contracts. It has no legal presence in Kenya beyond the claim it has filed. Yet it is now pursuing KETRACO’s wind-up before the Kenyan courts, with an insolvency petition filed in May 2024 and scheduled for hearing in July 2026.
The result of this labyrinthine structure is, as the Attorney General has warned in the starkest possible terms, that Kenya could end up paying Sh30 billion. Three separate entities now claim entitlement to the same Sh10 billion award: the dissolved Inabensa, still pursuing garnishee proceedings; C.A. Infraestructuras T & I SLU, which claims to hold the assigned rights; and the insolvency estate managed by Ernst and Young, which the AG warns could assert rights over the money on behalf of creditors. No Kenyan court has, to date, recognised the foreign insolvency proceedings, and under Kenya’s Insolvency Act, no foreign entity may enforce insolvency-related rights in Kenya without that prior judicial recognition.
The Attorney General warns Kenya could pay Sh30 billion to three separate entities for the same Sh10 billion debt to a company Spain has formally dissolved.
SEVENTEEN ACCOUNTS FROZEN, A NATION’S GRID AT RISK
On December 11, 2025, High Court Judge Peter Mulwa issued garnishee orders nisi freezing 17 of KETRACO’s bank accounts across NCBA Bank, Standard Chartered Kenya, Co-operative Bank of Kenya, Citibank N.A. Kenya, and KCB Bank Kenya. The orders allowed Inabensa the dissolved company to pursue enforcement directly from KETRACO’s operational funds.
The consequences were immediate and potentially catastrophic. KETRACO, a fully State-owned entity responsible for managing Kenya’s high-voltage national transmission grid, told the courts in unmistakable terms that the freeze had locked it out of funds needed to service loans, pay salaries, procure grid stability inputs, and carry out emergency maintenance of transmission infrastructure. “The freeze has heightened the risk of nationwide power blackouts,” KETRACO’s legal team warned in submissions, “because the utility does not have access to cash for repairs and maintenance.” The magnitude of the award, it added, “far outstrips the applicant’s financial capacity and asset base, hence its immediate enforcement will bring the applicant’s activities to an abrupt halt.”
KETRACO appealed to the Court of Appeal. The three-judge appellate bench refused to grant a stay. In its dismissal ruling, the bench said KETRACO had not satisfied it that there was an arguable appeal. The path to KETRACO’s accounts was reopened for a company that the Spanish state has declared dead.
On March 24, 2026, Justice Peter Mulwa ordered KETRACO to provide a Sh1 billion bank guarantee as a condition for unfreezing the accounts — in effect, compelling a State entity to pay a billion shillings into court as security for a debt owed to a dissolved foreign company. That billion shillings represents public funds. Taxpayer money. Gone.
THE HAVI DISCLOSURE: JUDGES AS SHAREHOLDERS
It is against this backdrop of cascading legal losses, a frozen national utility, and a debt swelling by the day, that the disclosure made by Nelson Havi SC takes on its full and alarming significance.
On February 3, 2026, Chief Justice Martha Koome convened what her office described as a “high-level consultative meeting” at the Judiciary headquarters. Attendees included Senior Counsel Philip Murgor, the chairman of the Senior Counsel Bar; Senior Counsel Ahmednasir Abdullahi; Senior Counsel Nelson Havi; and the former Law Society of Kenya President Faith Odhiambo. The stated agenda was systemic corruption in the judiciary and barriers to justice delivery.
What was disclosed at that meeting, according to Havi’s June 9 post on X, was specific, targeted, and damning.
Havi wrote that he and Murgor had disclosed to Chief Justice Koome the identities of “two mikoras” Swahili slang for corrupt beneficiaries connected to the KETRACO case: a Supreme Court judge who is the majority shareholder in the enterprise driving the litigation, and a High Court judge who is a major shareholder. He pointedly directed the Attorney General and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations to act.
Within hours, Ahmednasir Abdullahi had amplified the disclosure on the same platform, confirming that it “is an open secret in legal circles that this case against KETRACO is owned by judges.” He identified one as a Supreme Court judge and another as a High Court judge. He tagged Nelson Havi and the Law Society of Kenya.
These are not anonymous trolls. These are Senior Counsel of Kenya among the highest-ranked members of the Kenyan Bar who have made these disclosures in a meeting with the Chief Justice herself, and then publicly reaffirmed them in their own names. Both men have track records of accuracy in their judicial corruption allegations. Both have paid institutional prices for their outspokenness. The credibility threshold here is not in question.
THE CJ’S SILENCE AND THE BAR’S REVOLT
What has Chief Justice Koome done with these disclosures? The question is not rhetorical. At the February meeting, she invited the senior counsel to share exactly what they shared. She acknowledged the agenda of judicial corruption. She accepted the names. She then, according to what the Senior Counsel Bar has said publicly, failed to involve the Judicial Service Commission the only constitutional body with the power to investigate and remove judges in the subsequent follow-up processes.
By late May 2026, the Senior Counsel Bar had had enough. When the CJ convened a follow-up consultative meeting on May 29, the Bar boycotted it. Murgor, writing to the Chief Justice on May 26, was unambiguous: “The requested agenda items cannot be discussed in the absence of the JSC.” The Senior Counsel Bar declared it would not cooperate with the Chief Justice until meaningful action was taken against the corruption allegations. The meeting proceeded without them.
This is a remarkable breakdown. Kenya’s most senior lawyers, men and women who have access to the most sensitive information about how cases are manipulated in Kenyan courts, are refusing to participate in a process that excludes the investigative body they trust to act on what they know. Their withdrawal is itself a disclosure. It says, in the plainest institutional language, that the Chief Justice is not acting on what she has been told.
The EACC’s own National Gender and Corruption Survey 2025 found that magistrates received the highest average bribes of any public official in Kenya, at approximately Sh164,367 per transaction. The JSC’s own 2024/25 Annual Report recorded 214 petitions against judges under consideration during the reporting period, including 68 relating to alleged bribery and breaches of the Code of Conduct. The institutional data confirms the systemic picture the senior counsel are painting. Yet the JSC has issued no statement on the KETRACO judges. The DCI has announced no investigation. The AG has filed no challenge on the basis of judicial conflict of interest.
Kenya’s Senior Counsel Bar has boycotted CJ Koome’s anti-corruption forum, declaring it meaningless without JSC participation. The judges named in the KETRACO case remain on the bench.
THE PATTERN: JURISPESA AT SCALE
The allegations against the KETRACO judges do not exist in a vacuum. They form part of a documented and widening pattern of judicial corruption in Kenya that has been acknowledged, investigated, and prosecuted — but never decisively broken.
In March 2026, barely three months before the KETRACO disclosure exploded, the Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commission arrested former High Court judge Joseph Mutava and lawyer Kimani Wachira on allegations of soliciting a bribe of USD 80,000 approximately Sh10.4 million to influence the outcome of a commercial dispute involving former Cabinet Secretary Raphael Tuju. Mutava, who had previously been removed from the bench by tribunal in 2016 for gross misconduct and whose removal was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2019, had apparently continued to operate as a fixer in legal circles.
The EACC’s 2026 arrest was his second encounter with the anti-corruption agency.
Ahmednasir, whose ban from the Supreme Court — imposed by Chief Justice Koome in January 2024 and challenged by both his law firm and the LSK in the High Court was the judiciary’s institutional response to his anti-corruption campaign, has documented for years what he calls “JurisPesa”: the industrial-scale monetisation of judicial outcomes in Kenya’s commercial courts. His accusations have been called scandalous by the judiciary and courageous by civil society. The Supreme Court’s own move to ban him for scandalising the bench drew a counter-petition from the LSK, which argued the ban was unconstitutional and violated natural justice. In April 2026, Ahmednasir’s firm and the Supreme Court judges finally reached a settlement and the ban was effectively resolved.
The pattern that emerges from this accumulation of evidence Mutava’s bribery, the 214 active JSC petitions, the EACC’s own corruption survey data, and now the KETRACO shareholders disclosure is not one of isolated bad actors. It is one of a judiciary in which the monetisation of justice has become normalised within specific networks, and in which the institutional mechanisms for accountability have been consistently slower to act than the crimes they are meant to address.
THE LEGAL IMPOSSIBILITY THE COURTS ARE IGNORING
Beyond the corruption allegations, there is a pure legal question at the heart of the KETRACO case that the courts at every level appear to have either ignored or failed to grapple with: how can a company that no longer legally exists enforce a judgment?
The Attorney General’s office has been explicit on this point. Under Kenya’s Insolvency Act, foreign insolvency proceedings must be recognised by a Kenyan court before any enforcement action can be taken in Kenya. That recognition has not been sought, much less granted. Yet Inabensa’s garnishee proceedings brought in the name of a dissolved company have been upheld by both the High Court and the Court of Appeal.
The High Court’s December 11, 2025 garnishee orders were issued by Justice Peter Mulwa in favour of Instalaciones Inabensa. The Attorney General had warned the court, in written submissions, that Inabensa was dissolved. The court proceeded anyway. The Court of Appeal’s three-judge bench then declined to halt execution, finding that KETRACO had not demonstrated an arguable appeal. The combined effect of these two rulings is that a ghost company one that the Spanish state has formally struck from legal existence has been handed the keys to a Kenyan State utility’s bank accounts.
If the judges who have facilitated this outcome are, as Havi and Ahmednasir allege, themselves shareholders in the entity standing behind these proceedings, then what Kenya is witnessing is not merely judicial incompetence or legal complexity. It is a conspiracy to defraud the State, executed through the instruments of the State’s own justice system. The corruption is not the icing on the scandal. It is the engine of it.
WHAT THE DCI, THE AG, AND THE JSC MUST DO NOW
The disclosures made by Havi and Ahmednasir are specific enough to constitute actionable intelligence for multiple investigative institutions. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations has the legal authority and the forensic capability to establish beneficial ownership structures. It must immediately open a formal investigation into the shareholding of every entity that has appeared in the KETRACO-Inabensa litigation as a claimant, agent, or representative, and cross-reference those shareholdings against the judiciary’s register of financial interests.
The Attorney General’s office, which has already produced a confidential brief identifying the core legal absurdities in this case, must file a formal intervention in the current proceedings challenging the capacity of a dissolved company to enforce a Kenyan judgment. That intervention must also seek the vacation of all garnishee orders granted to Inabensa pending the resolution of the capacity question.
The Judicial Service Commission must open disciplinary proceedings against the judges named to Chief Justice Koome in the February meeting. The JSC’s own records show 68 pending petitions alleging bribery and Code of Conduct breaches. Adding the two KETRACO judges to that active file is a constitutional obligation. Failure to do so will constitute a further breach of the JSC’s mandate and will validate every allegation that the Commission shields rather than disciplines corrupt judges.
Chief Justice Koome, having received the names of the two judges in her meeting with Havi and Murgor, bears personal accountability for what happens next. She cannot claim ignorance. She cannot outsource this to a consultative process that excludes the JSC. The Senior Counsel Bar has told her exactly what conditions are necessary for meaningful action. Those conditions are not onerous. They are constitutional.
THE NATIONAL INTEREST
KETRACO is not a private company. It is the backbone of Kenya’s national power transmission infrastructure. Its 17 frozen accounts are not the private property of shareholders who can absorb a loss. They are public funds, budget allocations, development finance. The Sh10 billion at stake is money that could fund the transmission lines Kenya needs to industrialise, to connect rural communities to the grid, to honour its regional energy trade obligations.
The prospect of paying Sh30 billion three times the same debt, to three entities none of which has a clean legal title to the money is not a legal technicality. It is a national emergency. It is the kind of State loss that defines administrations, destroys reputations, and, when it is the product of deliberate manipulation by those entrusted to adjudicate it, constitutes a crime.
Two judges are named. Their names are known to the Chief Justice. Their names are known to the Attorney General. Their names are known to the Senior Counsel Bar. Their names will, in time, become known to the public. The question that Kenya now puts to its institutions of accountability is simple: will those institutions act before the money is gone, or after?
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